Faster Smarter Beginning Programming

Getting It Together with Concatenation Operators

You can concatenate strings using either the plus (+) operator or the ampersand (&) operator. The following statements are equivalent:

strResult = "Welcome to " + "my circus."
strResult = "Welcome to " & "my circus."

Experienced programmers, however, never use the plus (+) operator for joining strings. There are two very good reasons for this:

• It’s very easy to code an expression such as a + b that you think will concatenate the variables a and b. However, if the variables are numeric, this expression actually adds them. The expression a & b always performs a concatenation.

• Visual Basic .NET halts with a compilation error if you use the plus (+) operator to concatenate a mixture of String variables ...