In Excel VBA, the length of a number is not determined by the number of digits it has, but rather by the number of characters it takes to represent that number.
When working with numbers in Excel VBA, they are typically stored as numeric values rather than strings.
Numeric values can be integers, decimals, or scientific notation.
When you refer to the length of the number 4 as 2 in Excel VBA, it means that the number 4 is represented as a two-character string when converted to a string data type.
Let’s consider some examples to understand this better:
Example 1:
Dim num1 As Long
num1 = 4
MsgBox Len(CStr(num1))
In this example, we declare a variable called “num1” and assign it the value 4.
The “Len” function is used to determine the length of a string. To convert the numeric value to a string, we use the “CStr” function.
The “MsgBox” function is used to display the result, which will be 2 because the number 4 is represented as a two-character string.
Example 2:
Dim num2 As Double
num2 = 12345.6789
MsgBox Len(CStr(num2))
In this example, we declare a variable called “num2” and assign it the value 12345.6789.
The “Len” function is used to determine the length of a string. To convert the numeric value to a string, we use the “CStr” function.
The “MsgBox” function is used to display the result, which will be 10 because the number 12345.6789 is represented as a ten-character string.
It is important to note that when performing calculations or comparisons with numeric values in Excel VBA, the length of the number is not relevant.
The length only becomes significant when dealing with the string representation of a number, such as when displaying or manipulating it as text.