Originally posted by Kyoufu Kawa

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To finally lay the "no pointers in VB" crap to rest, here's an excerpt from Win32 API Programming with Visual Basic I found in my copy of MSDN. I've marked the important part, StrPtr. There's also VarPtr and possibly a third.

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Translating Between Byte Arrays and BSTRs
To copy a BSTR:

Dim s As String

to a byte array, we can proceed in a couple of different ways. For a strictly VB solution, we have:

s = "help"
Dim b(1 To 8) As Byte
For i = 1 To 8
b(i) = AscB(MidB(s, i))
Next

Another approach is:

s = "help"
Dim b(1 To 8) As Byte
CopyMemory b(1), ByVal StrPtr(s), LenB(s)

Note that (in both cases) we get:

104 0 101 0 108 0 112 0

showing that the bytes are reversed in each Unicode integer.

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