All Characters can be reffered to as a string
if can check Chapter 6(string menupulation) Visual Basic.Net by Daine Zak
You will note that there is property of a string that is used to Check and search for a specific character.Using any Book of
VB.Net try to use string.Length which with tell you the number of characters including the spaces and use string.indexof to search for the spaces and use string.remove to remove the spaces then back to string.length to get the number of characters without the spaces.
Hope and trusting my respose will be highly useful
LT Bebeza