Handle Error 9 when there is an Empty Array

Question

I am writing a script that will loop through an Excel spreadsheet and find if there are duplicates of selected cells. If there are duplicates then the function will return

Answer 1

You can check if the array is empty by retrieving total elements count using JScript's VBArray() object (works with arrays of variant type, single or multidimensional):

Sub Test()

    Dim a() As Variant
    Dim b As Variant
    Dim c As Long

    ' Uninitialized array of variant
    ' MsgBox UBound(a) ' gives 'Subscript out of range' error
    MsgBox GetElementsCount(a) ' 0

    ' Variant containing an empty array
    b = Array()
    MsgBox GetElementsCount(b) ' 0

    ' Any other types, eg Long or not Variant type arrays
    MsgBox GetElementsCount(c) ' -1

End Sub

Function GetElementsCount(aSample) As Long

    Static oHtmlfile As Object ' instantiate once

    If oHtmlfile Is Nothing Then
        Set oHtmlfile = CreateObject("htmlfile")
        oHtmlfile.parentWindow.execScript ("function arrlength(arr) {try {return (new VBArray(arr)).toArray().length} catch(e) {return -1}}"), "jscript"
    End If
    GetElementsCount = oHtmlfile.parentWindow.arrlength(aSample)

End Function

For me it takes about 0.3 mksec for each element + 15 msec initialization, so the array of 10M elements takes about 3 sec. The same functionality could be implemented via ScriptControl ActiveX (it is not available in 64-bit MS Office versions, so you can use workaround like this).