2.3.2 Character Expressions

Character expressions consist of character elements and character operators. The evaluation of a character expression yields a single value with a character data type. Character expressions take the following form:

character-element [//character-element] . . .

character-element

Is any one of the following entities:

• Character scalar reference

• Character substring

• Character expression, optionally enclosed in parentheses

• Character function reference

The only character operator is the concatenation operator (//).

The value of a character expression is a character string formed by successive left-to-right concatenations of the values of the elements of the character expression. The length of a character expression is the sum of the lengths of the character elements. For example, the value of the character expression 'AB'/ /'CDE' is 'ABCDE', which has a length of five.

Parentheses do not affect the value of a character expression; for example, the following character expressions are equivalent:

('ABC'//'DE')//'F'
'ABC'//('DE'//'F')
'ABC'//'DE'//'F'

Each of these character expressions has the value 'ABCDEF'.

If a character element in a character expression contains spaces, the spaces are included in the value of the character expression. For example:

'ABC '//'D E'//'F ' has a value of 'ABC D EF '