![]() NOTE: Where as ASCII is a standard for the values 0-127, typically on Windows PCs the installed ANSI codepage (code numbers 128-255) will be Windows-1252 for western languages. ASCII Extended (Windows 1252), rendered in Excel with CHAR function Window’s own code pages were just one of many ANSI extensions at the time, and itself an augmented version based on ISO-8859. The code characters 128-255 extended the earlier ASCII character set, using 8-bit encoding (commonly referred to as ANSI or ASCII Extended encodings) to provide addition symbols like £, €, and non English accented western letters such as ñ, ß. ![]() Other non-printing characters have no visible output. NOTE: Excel renders some control characters as squares or rectangle symbols. ASCII, rendered in Excel with CHAR function The first half of Window’s code pages were based on the original 7-bit encoding defined by ASCII in the 1960’s, which allowed for 128 characters and hardware instruction codes, such as Carriage Return, Escape and Tab, to be mapped to binary values. The user encoding would access default encoding of the computer’s ‘locale’ when reading and writing text data, which for western languages Windows used its code page 1252. Up until Windows NT when Microsoft adopted Unicode, Character Encoding in Excel relied on the extended ASCII character sets described by Windows Code Pages. Therefore if you have a spreadsheet which uses data sourced externally, you are likely, eventually, to find unexpected characters hiding in your data you’ll want to remove. The real culprit for introducing unwanted characters comes from data imported into Excel from an external file, process or connection. There are a number of computer characters which are non printable, so how do they get into our data? It’s therefore very unlikely that non standard text characters will be introduced by typing directly into Excel. Have you ever tried to type a Tab into a string in Excel? Well if you’ve tried, the default operation is to execute the cell value or function and move the cursor the the next cell. When do we get non-printing characters in Excel? Spacing Characters vs Non-Printing Characters.We will also see what non-printing characters are and how they differ from spacing character and why computers have them and how they might appear in our spreadsheets. SUBSTITUTE is more general but can be used to target specific problem characters.Ĭontinue reading to understand what these functions can do and in which situations each should be used. TRIM is designed to work with unwanted spaces, whereas CLEAN tackles most unwanted non-printing ASCII characters. ![]() CLEAN, TRIM & SUBSTITUTE all help remove unwanted characters from text in Excel, but are used to achieve distinct outcomes.
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