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User’s Guide


- Concatenation

Produces a character value by joining two character strings or expressions, after removing any trailing spaces from the first expression.

SYNTAX

expression - expression 

expression

An expression whose value is a character string.

EXAMPLE

This expression formats the city, state, and postal code for an address, including removing any trailing spaces from the City, State, and Postal-Code fields:

City - ", " - State - "  " - Postal-Code 

NOTE

If any of the string values you concatenate is UNKNOWN, then the result is UNKNOWN (?). This might lead to unexpected results if a field used in an expression is not mandatory. For example, you might have fields for a person’s first name, last name, and middle initial. You might combine these into a full name with an expression like the following:

First-Name - " " - Mid-Init - " " - Last-Name 

This expression returns “First-NameMid-InitLast-Name”. If you used the + concatenation operator instead of the - concatenation operator, the expression would returns “First-Name Mid-Init Last-Name”.

If Mid-Init is not a mandatory field, then in some records Mid-Init can be set to UNKNOWN (?). If so, the result of the expression is UNKNOWN. You can avoid this by using the following expression:

First-Name - " " + (IIF(Mid-Init <> ?, Mid-Init + ". ", "") + Last-Name 


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