Solved What is going on here?

[riktek]

Backslashes are the escape character in C and Bash. It operates to quote the immediately following character in a string. This usage is a bit of Access' C++ code making it past compilation.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I *think* that without the extra backslashes the dashes are treated as minus operators instead of string literals

When presented to a Format string as an actual argument, and further, when the format string is enclosed in quotes, VBA doesn't try to evaluate the string as an expression. If presented as a NON-quoted string, Access's VBA context would evaluate the expression BEFORE passing it in to the function using it. That's when the minus signs become more than just constant "punctuation."