Stupid Question: Joining Strings

[lee]

Hi

This is a dumb question as I know it's fairly easy but I cant seem to
find an example after two hours of searching.

In a stored procedure I'm trying to build up a string eg,

(the following is in a loop)

IF @xcount 0
BEGIN
Set @list = @list + @title + ': ' + @xcount
END

Problem is when I come to return @list, it's always NULL - when I know
there should be data returned. Any ideas?

Thanks
Lee

[Roy Harvey]

The problem is that NULL concatenated with NULL results in NULL. So
unless @list is initialized with something it will always remain NULL
no matter how many things care concatenated on.

declare @list varchar(20)
set @list = @list + 'banana'
select @list

set @list = ''
set @list = @list + 'banana'
select @list

--------------------
NULL

--------------------
banana

As you see, even ititilizing it to an empty string is enough.

Roy Harvey
Beacon Falls, CT

On 20 Jan 2007 14:06:47 -0800, le*@digital-interactive.com wrote:

>Hi

This is a dumb question as I know it's fairly easy but I cant seem to
find an example after two hours of searching.

In a stored procedure I'm trying to build up a string eg,

(the following is in a loop)

IF @xcount 0
BEGIN
Set @list = @list + @title + ': ' + @xcount
END

Problem is when I come to return @list, it's always NULL - when I know
there should be data returned. Any ideas?

Thanks
Lee