Working with bytes vs characters

["Paul Rehill" <paul.rehill@gmail.com>]

I am trying to code to calculate the number of bytes rather than
characters to read incoming data from sockets.

I am aiming to read in data to the end of some closing tag, let's call
it Str1="</sometag>" that has been extracted using the Lookahead
function for a socket.  sLook is the full string data obtained using
the LookAhead function.

If I was only working with characters and not bytes, I could use the
following code to determine iTagEnd which represents the number of
characters to be read by a socket's read function:
    iFoundTag=Instr(sLook, Str1)
    iTagLength=Len(Str1)
    iTagEnd=iFoundTag+iTagLength-1

But since I am working with bytes, I have replaced Instr with InstrB,
Len with LenB and 1 in the above code with LenB(Left(Str1,1)) as in
the following code:

    iFoundTag=InstrB(sLook, Str1)
    iTagLength=LenB(Str1)
    iTagEnd=iFoundTag+iTagLength-LenB(Left(Str1,1))

Then I would use code like Me.Read(iTagEnd, UTF8Encod) to read in the
specified bytes.  I suspect (from a discussion in an earlier thread)
that since I'm using UTF8 Encoding on strings that are written or
read, the above 2 code blocks are equivalent (1 character = 1 byte
always in UTF8 Encoding?).  But I think the second block is more
robust since it can cater for strings where different encoding is
specified (say UTF16 is specified).

Does this look OK?

Thanks in advance

Paul

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