Concatenation
joining of strings in a programming language
In formal language theory and computer programming, concatenation is the operation of joining sequential objects, such as character strings, files, lists or pieces of audio or video, end-to-end. For example, the concatenation of "snow" and "ball" is "snowball". In certain formalizations of concatenation theory, also called string theory, string concatenation is a primitive notion.
Terminology
To concatenate is to join two or more sequential objects together to create a new object, generally without modifying any of the original objects.
To append is to modify a sequential object by adding material at the end. Thus to append a to b is to modify b to be equal to the concatenation of the original value of b and a. Despite this, in some high-level programming languages, especially functional and logical ones, append is the operation for concatenating lists or arrays without modifying the originals.
To prepend is to modify a sequential object by adding material at the beginning. Thus to prepend a to b is to modify b to be equal to the concatenation of a and the original value of b.
Syntax
In many programming languages, string concatenation is a binary infix operator, and in some it is written without an operator.
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This entry incorporates text from “Concatenation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.