viable question

[adamwalan]

Why this always returning 'AAA'

declare @ss char(20)

set @ss='AAA'

set @ss=@ss+'BBB'
print @ss

[Ed Murphy]

ad*******@yahoo.com wrote:

Why this always returning 'AAA'

declare @ss char(20)

set @ss='AAA'

set @ss=@ss+'BBB'
print @ss

Try either
declare @ss varchar(20)
or
set @ss=rtrim(@ss)+'BBB'

[Hugo Kornelis]

On 13 Oct 2006 20:13:34 -0700, ad*******@yahoo.com wrote:

>Why this always returning 'AAA'

declare @ss char(20)

set @ss='AAA'

set @ss=@ss+'BBB'
print @ss

Hi adamwalan,

Ed Murphy already supplied two fixes. The answer to the question "why"
is that char(20) is fixed-length - it's always 20 position. So if you
assign 'AAA', SQL Server pads it with 17 spaces. Then you concatenate
'BBB' to it, to get a 23-character string 'AAA (etc) BBB' - and when
you assign that back to @ss, the rightmost three bytes (the 'BBB' part)
is trimmed off.

So technically, SQL Server isn'r returning 'AAA', but 'AAA (etc) '.

And here's a short repro that clearly shows the intermediate result
before @ss+'BBB' gets trimmed for assigning it to the char(20) column.

declare @ss char(20)
set @ss='AAA'
print @ss+'BBB'
--
Hugo Kornelis, SQL Server MVP