Ron gave you the answer.... you need to add spaces around the ampersand when
it is being used for concatenation (you cannot rely on VB to automatically
format the spaces in for you). Why? It has to do with VB's backward
compatibility with the BASIC languages it was derived from. In the "old
days" (although there are some that still do this), you were able to declare
your variables with a postfix symbol to indicate the data type. The
ampersand symbol was used to declare a variable as Long. So, you did this to
establish a Long variable...
Dim MyVariable&
The worse thing about using the postfix symbol is that you were able to
force the declaration at the time of first use without providing a Dim
statement beforehand. So, if you did this...
X = 10 * MyVariable&
in code without first Dim'ming the variable as a Long, VB would
automatically Dim it as a Long for you the first time it came across the &
attached to the variable name. Even worse, in the old, old days of BASIC
(those prior to VB), you could actually have the same name (names were
limited to 2 characters back then) with different postfix symbols. So you
could have (again, back in the old, old days) AB%, AB!, AB$ (and I don't
remember the other available symbols any more) in one program and they would
all be different. To account for this behavior, BASIC had to allow the
postfix symbol to be used whenever the variable was used. The early VB's,
trying to maintain backward code compatibility (as much as the switch from
procedural BASIC to event driven VB would allow that is), continued to allow
the postfix symbol to be used whenever the variable was used (although, as I
vaguely remember, the ability to have the same name used with different data
types was eliminated when the "As <VarType>" declaration were created).
Anyway, the reason you need the space after the variable name, and before
the ampersand, is because VB isn't able to decide if you are applying a Long
postfix symbol to the variable name or simply trying to concatenate it.
The above explains (I hope) why you **always** need the space in front of
the ampersand when it is used as a concatenation symbol. There are times
(not in your example, when you also need to put a space after the ampersand
that is used for concatenating text after it. If the variable name after the
ampersand starts with an "h" or an "H", you must include the separating
space between them. In VB, &H and &h indicate to VB to consider what follows
are hexadecimal digits (for example, &HFACE is the decimal number -1330). If
you set up this statement...
CombinedText = TextVariabe &HFACE
then VB would assume &HFACE was the value -1330 and would produce a syntax
error because you have two values without an operator of some sort between
them... VB would not see the ampersand as a concatenation symbol. This is a
problem **only** when what follows the "h" or "H" in the variable name can
make a valid hexadecimal number... a variable named HLine would not be a
problem because &HLine is not a valid hexadecimal number, so for that
variable name, VB would automatically insert the space between the ampersand
and the "H". To be safe, though, you **always** need to include the space
before the ampersand if a variable name precedes it and it is usually a good
idea to include the space after it if a variable name follows it (just so
you don't have to remember the leading "h/H" character exception).
