Grouped query still showing duplicates

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I have a weird problem with MS Access, where a grouped query still shows what appears to be like identical strings

The query is as basic as it can be, so for instance

SELECT string, Count([string]) as Qty
FROM myTable
GROUP BY string

My result set however shows duplicated records that look exactly the same to the eye, but appear to be different to the application. Quite some rows as below are in the returned data:

| some_value     | 5  |
| some_value     | 15 |
| another_value  | 10 | 

etc, so the 'some_value' entry is in twice where it should be only once. The data originally comes from flat files, and imported into access using UTF8 encoding. Since the original source might use a variety on encodings my first guess would be that although visually the strings look the same, the encoding is probably different.

So my question : is it possible within access (vba) to validate the actual encoding of a string, or are their ways to encode strings to the same format ?

Or is there something else that might cause this behavior ? I've verified that the strings are identical for the eye, there are no white spaces or anything else visible that might cause the difference, so it's pretty clear the difference is on a non visual level (if that makes any sense at all)

asked 37 secs ago

Wokoman

255