What is happening in this code

Question

I was looking for some vb6 that would allow me to populate a listbox with a directory of files when I found the following elegant piece of code.

List1.hwnd, &H18D, &H20, "directory*.*"

Most of the other examples I found were 4 or more lines of code. Can someone help me understand what is happening here? What is the

List1.hwnd, &H18D, &H20

Part doing?

There was a general declaration I left out.

  Private Declare Function SendMessageStr Lib "user32" Alias "SendMessageA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal wMsg As Long, ByVal wParam As Long, ByVal lParam As String) As Long

Thats the whole code. I can use this and either hard code the "directory" part or use open dialog and populate a listbox with every file inside of the directory. I described what the code does in the first sentence. — JForgie, Jan 05 '15 at 15:39
it seems to me these are the values which are submitted to a function call ... the functionname is missing though ... are you sure this is the complete line ? maybe this line of code started 1 line earlier and continued on this line ? — Hrqls, Jan 05 '15 at 16:00
please post a large part of the code : the whole function this is in, or at least a few lines before this line and 1 or 2 lines after this line — Hrqls, Jan 05 '15 at 16:01
This can't be the entire code, as there is no definition of what `List1` is to be seen. The line as written won't do anything, because there is nothing functional there. — Ken White, Jan 05 '15 at 16:02
You are all correct. Apologies. Fairly new at this. Main question has been updated. — JForgie, Jan 05 '15 at 16:23

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

Your edit still makes not enough sense - unless the code was

SendMessageStr List1.hwnd, &H18D, &H20, "directory*.*"

and you thought the space means it's a stand-alone bit (it isn't).

That code is

SendMessage (List1.hwnd, LB_DIR, DDL_ARCHIVE, "directory*.*")

- it sends a documented Windows message to a ListBox control named List1 to fill it with files that match the mask "directory*.*", including the archived ones.

What is happening in this code

1 Answers1