Strings in Visual Basic and Visual Basic For Applications

Visual Basic (VB) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) use BStrings as their main string type. These languages do a very good job of hiding from the programmer the complexity of handling BStrings. Because of this, most Visual Basic programmers are not aware of the rules to handle BStrings (see previous sections). However, these rules are strictly enforced in the code generated by the Visual Basic compiler. This observance allows the tight integration you see between Visual Basic and COM/OLE services.

In Visual Basic, you can store strings in three different forms; fixed-length strings, variable-length strings, and in Variant structures. The first two are normal BStrings. In the third case, the Variant structure contains a reference to a BString. The manual for this module only deals with the first two types of BStrings. For an explanation of Variants and their use in Fortran, check the documentation for f90VB's Variants module.

Variable-length strings