Concatenation Assignment (||=)

The ||= operator used after the LET keyword, assigns a variable by concatenating the current variable value to an expression.

Syntax

variable ||= expr

Important:

This operator cannot be used as an element of an expression, it is only allowed as assignment operator with the LET instruction.

Usage

The ||= assignment operator concatenates the value of the left-hand variable to the right-hand expression, and assigns the result to the variable.

Unlike the ,= operator, with ||=, the right-hand expression is concatenated wihout any additional left space padding.

If one of operands of ||= is NULL, the resulting string will be NULL.

The target variable should be a VARCHAR, STRING or TEXT variable.

Note that CHAR(size) variables are blank-padded to size characters. As result, it's useless to apply the ||= assignment operator, as the value of the left-hand operand already fills the CHAR size completely.

Example

MAIN
  DEFINE x STRING
  LET x = "abc"
  LET x ||= "def"
  DISPLAY x
END MAIN