Function to determine if a string contains multibyte characters or not

Hi,

I'm trying to write a really simple function which will return either TRUE or FALSE depending on whether a string contains multibyte characters or not. The reason I need to do this is to create another string handling function, however, it needs to know if it's handling a western or Japanese string first. So, it would work something like this:

MultibyteChecker("We ate bacon and bread") = FALSE

MultibyteChecker("ベーコンとパンを食べた") = TRUE

Thanks a lot for reading!

=LEN(A1)<>LENB(A1)
Should return True/False

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the reply! Based on that, I wrote something like this:

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However, it's returning true for both strings right now. Is there something that I've missed? Do you know if there's any other way to distinguish between strings containing Japanese text or not?

Thanks!

LenB in vba is different from worksheet function.

A bit tricky...

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@Jindon: I tried that code, but I'm now getting "FALSE" for both strings (and for one containing both double and single byte characters.

@SixthSense: Thanks a lot, I also tried this formula, but similarly, this is returning "NON-ENGLISH" for both strings as well. Also, for my application, I think byte-counting will probably work better, but thanks so much anyway.

See...................

@Izandol: Thanks so much, that completely solves my issue. (I'll be honest, I'm not familiar with variables like "Byte" or functions like "LBound", so I would never have thought of that).

@Jindon: Thanks again for the illustrative sheet. When I opened it, it was showing the correct output, however, when I recalculated the formulas, it was back to returning everything as FALSE again. So I guess this is something that works fine at your end, but not at mine for some reason! Maybe it's because of this, a bit of info that I found on the MS Office website:

LENB counts 2 bytes per character only when a DBCS language is set as the default language. Otherwise LENB behaves the same as LEN, counting 1 byte per character.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out with this!

Ah I see, thanks for the link.

This formula says it is invalid in EXCEL 2016! what is the problem?

=IF(A1="","",IF(ISERROR(SUMPRODUCT(SEARCH(MID(A1,ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A1))),1),"0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.;,"))),"NON-ENGLISH","ENGLISH"))