Chr(34)

Chr(34). What kind of drugs am I on with this rant? One of th emost frustrating things I have come across with vbScript is it's handling of odd characters. Say I want something that looks like

"Hello,
World."

In Perl this is a matter of typing in

print "\"Hello,\nWorld.\"";

The backslash works as an incoming special character next alert. Double quotes are special characters. It's almost self explanatory that way. The \n means new line. Let's write the same peice of text in vbScript.

Wscript.Echo Chr(34) & "Hello," & vbCRLF & "World." & Chr(34)

It's twice as long, contains an outside object call, two functions and a built in constant. People who say Perl is line noise should have a look at this first. And it isn't as if the scripty people at Microsoft didn't know about \n as a substitute for Carriage Return Line Feed. (new line for anybody who doesn't use dot matrix printers as their text out interface.) They use it for matching regular expressions.

So how does writing things to the screen get to be so messy? I think it's probably down to a battle of wills. For instance, in my job I get to code any way I like to. The decisions I make are my own. The style I use is used by one person on a team of 8. And the down side of this is that I have to know exactly what is going on and document it all to keep up our quality certification.

Because Microsoft has lots of coders and (probably more importantly) managers, we see a battle of wills with their flagship language. If a coder has a new method of making coding more consistent across a range of areas, he has to convince his manager, who has to convince his manager who has to care enough to inform two downstream managers that this should go ahead. That is a lot of convincing to make something go ahead. Not gonna happen.

Whereas Larry Wall when he designed perl started out making the decisions himself. A coder who wished to change the direction of perl needs only convince Larry (or whoever is pump king these days) that it is a good idea and the change will be made. And it doesn't even have to be that bad.

print '"Hello,
World."'


will also work. So we see the difference between the One True Way and TIMTOWTDI.

On a side note, I would suggest that making pop up dialog boxes with more than one line of information in them is probably a bad thing because most users don't read even that one line. The ones that do, probably won't bother with the second.

So what do we do with this horror? I suppose we could all give up and code in javascript or perl, but if you work in establishments such as mine, vbScript is mandated as "The" scripting language. The first problem is the double quote. vbScript refuses to handle it as anything besides the beginning or the end of a quote. Chr(34) is the only way to print this. It is built in. if you feel like it you could include a line such as

Const vbQuot = Chr(34)

which at least has the advantage of readability in the example.

Wscript.Echo vbQuot & "Hello," & vbCRLF & "World." & vbQuot

The other thing that bugs me is the vb prefix to internal constants. Yes it is nice to flag such things, but it puts me in mind of those applications that install under Windows that stick a shortcut in every conceivable place to give the application screen presence. Even when it is not needed. You get a desktop icon, a start menu icon, a quick launch icon, a toll tray icon that does nothing more than chew up memory and slow down start times. They then pin the icon onto your right click wherever possible.

The same thing can be said of the vb. I've paid for the product. Why are you trying to sell it to me over and over when I write a constant?

Enough rants. Must go to bed.