Find question marks -- need escape character

[EllenM]

Hello,
I'm looking for "?"s. I apparently need an escape character to find them.

Many specials characters, such as the less than, or Greek symbols got
converted to question marks and I need to find them.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Ellen

 

[John W. Vinson]

Hello,
I'm looking for "?"s. I apparently need an escape character to find them.

Many specials characters, such as the less than, or Greek symbols got
converted to question marks and I need to find them.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Ellen

If you're looking for a literal ? character from the keyboard you can use

LIKE "*[?]*"

The square brackets "escape" the wildcard and cause Access to treat the text
as literal.

HOWEVER... a Greek or other non-standard character will almost certainly be
*stored* as a numeric character code outside the usual set (for example, a
Greek capital Delta is stored as Unicode 0394, and will be *DISPLAYED* as a
questionmark if the program you're using doesn't have a Greek font enabled.
Access usually won't unless you take steps to support other languages! You
would need to search for

LIKE "*" & Chr(394) & "*"

to find the Delta.

 

[EllenM]

Thanks so much, John. I was able to find the question marks.

The data originated in a web page, then taken into Excel, then to Access, so
I'm not sure how some of these special characters were handled along the way.
Seems mainly into question marks.

 

[John W. Vinson]

Thanks so much, John. I was able to find the question marks.

The data originated in a web page, then taken into Excel, then to Access, so
I'm not sure how some of these special characters were handled along the way.
Seems mainly into question marks.

Yep! By that point the Unicode would be long gone (and unrecoverable).