Question

I’m maintaining an application written in Microsoft Access with VBA.

I’m glancing over my code and have just noticed I have subconsciously been concatenating strings together with the plus (+) symbol instead of the ampersand. It’s been a few years since I’ve coded in VB6. Could this cause any issues?

Everything seems fine and it will only take a few minutes to fix, I’m just curious as to whether I’m technically doing anything wrong.

Answer 1

The ampersand is explicitly a string operation, while the plus is overloaded:

Dim num1 As Integer
num1 = RandomNumberBetween(1, 9)

Dim num2 As Integer
num2 = RandomNumberBetween(1, 9)

Dim randomAge As String 'trying to get a random age between 11 and 99

' works
randomDate = "Your age is " & num1 & num2 

'broken
randomDate = "Your age is " + num1 + num2 

When used with numbers the plus sign will add.