Access 2002 Programming by Example

The Art of Concatenation

For example, it is not out of the ordinary to import a table with a date such as “111197.” Assuming that the string has already been parsed out into month, day, and year components, how do you concatenate the string into a date with slashes added? Because it is all text, you can use the plus (+) operator (which works in almost any programming language) to concatenate like this:

“11” + “/” + “11” + “/” + “97” 

If every record in the field containing this number has the slashes, you can convert the field to an Access date field. The plus operator behaves differently, depending on what type of data is being referenced. Table 19.1 reveals the different results obtained when working with variables in expressions using the ...