& or + ?

[LAURENS]

What do you prefer for a string concatenation and why ?

I prefer & because
- it shows explicitly what the code is supposed to do.
- it forces a concatenation even if the variables aren't
declared as string.

A collegue of mine insist on using +. He claims it's faster, (which was true in vb4 but not anymore in vb5 and up) and better in general because & is a variant operator which you should avoid. This wouldn't be so annoying if he hadn't developed the habit of scanning all code on & and changing them to + which becomes very annoying after a while.

So what do you think ?

[Iain17]

& is unambiguous. It clearly defines that you will be concatenating two strings.

+ can be misinterpreted, and many beginners in VB ask why the get the answer "1234" when doing the operation "12" + "34".

[Rodik]

Altough the ampersand is a variant operator it's still better to use in code because you see exactly what the code is supposed to do.

There's a disadvantage, however, but as you get more experienced, it disappears.

If I write this (unformatted by vb):

seekval = "the value being seek
msgbox SeekVal&" times " & OtherVar

then vb says it's syntax error, and I ask myself why da hell? It's just the simple reason that I'm telling it that the variable 'SeekVal' is a Long when it actually is a String, so vb get's all smarty and starts arguing.

The plus sign is actually only ment for addition calculations from VB5. The reason why it can work as a concatenation symbol is for compatibility with old version programmers.

[LAURENS]

Thanks guys, I couldn't agree more.

[Harrild]

'+' is a mathematical term to add 2 numbers together.
'&' is a VB term to add 2 strings together.

[Gen-X]

Actually '&' is a VB term to implicitly convert the contents of both sides into strings and concatenate them.

[michelle]

Hello LAURENS,

As a VB database user I prever to use "&".

If you made a new record in a recordset all fields are Null.

If you want to add (with "+") a Null text field to a string variable, the operation will gives an "invalid use of null" error.

When you are using the "&" sign, the error will not occur.

Maybe this is a reason to use "&" !
Nice regards,

Michelle.