(Sorry if this posts twice.. Web based readers are PitA's!)
As far as I have ever experienced, you cannot directly enter any control
codes (ASCII codes 0-31 decimal / 0x00-0x1F hex (or &H00-&H1F for the VB
purists ;-))) directly from the keyboard, not even using the ALT+0nnn trick
on the numeric keyboard. Think of it like the ALT key on many keyboards; The
ALT key is a modifier key that changes how the keyboard operates _or_ how the
program interprets the following keystrokes. The control key and any control
codes it helps generate are much the same. The only real difference is that
when ASCII was first designed, the control codes were assigned a block of
ASCII codes so they could be transmitted over the data link to control the
recieving end. There was no intention at that time that such codes would ever
be *part* of the data stream, so there was little reason that teletypes,
computers, etc, needed to directly enter the codes. Sorry if I'm not being
very clear about that all, I'm trying not to give a long technical
explaination.. Just enough to understand why you cannot.
What you can do, however, is write some code (VBA can do it, not sure about
macros) which can either insert such codes directly as part of their
processing, or you can write a conversion routine and assign it to an
input/edit event (I'm not entirely sure how to do this in VBA, I only know it
_can_ be done.) Typically, you'd have such a routine scan through the string
and find special sequences, called "escape sequences", like "\x03" (many
programming and scripting language use such escape sequences for special
codes) and convert them into the proper bytes before storing it in your
database.
Alternatively, you can store the data "as-is" (meaning, if you type "\x03"
into the field, it's stored as the text string "\x03", not as the hex code
0x03) directly in the database, and do the conversion only when you extract
the data.
Each method has it's pro's and con's, and which is best depends on what you
plan to do with it.
HTH,
C.
