Concatenation

You can use a concatenation character (|) as follows to combine two or more strings or variables into a single variable (%%varname):

%%varname = value1 | value2 | value3 |…

For example, if the value of %%invoice is $21.00, then

%%MSG = 'Total amount due: ' | %%invoice | '.'

would result in %%MSG being equal to "Total amount due: $21.00".

Note: On mainframe systems you can use either a solid vertical bar (|, EBCDIC X’4F’) or a broken vertical bar (¦, EBCDIC X’6A’) as a concatenation character. On UNIX systems, the vertical bar is sometimes displayed solid, sometimes broken, but is always ASCII X’7C’.