Question on Unicode and string conversions in VBA

[RichardSchollar]

Given the following two code snippets, how come I get different output?


Code:
Sub test()
Dim str As String
Dim b() As Byte
str = "hello"
b() = str
str = ""
For i = LBound(b) To UBound(b)
str = str & b(i) & " "
Next i
Debug.Print str
End Sub


The above produces the following output:

Code:
104 0 101 0 108 0 108 0 111 0


second procedure:

Code:
Sub test2()
Dim str As String
Dim b() As Byte
str = "hello"
b() = StrConv(str, vbUnicode)
str = ""
For i = LBound(b) To UBound(b)
str = str & b(i) & " "
Next i
Debug.Print str
End Sub


Which produces this output:

Code:
104 0 0 0 101 0 0 0 108 0 0 0 108 0 0 0 111 0 0 0


My question is: why the additional zeroes from the second procedure?
Assigning a string to a byte array fills the byte array with the
unicode characters, and I thought this was essentially what the StrConv
function did (with vbUnicode option).

Can anyone settle my curiosity?

Thanks for any/all replies!

Best regards

Richard