At 13:46 Wednesday, 05.03.2003 +0000, you wrote:

>result = string1 || string2;

but be sure to test if one of the strings is NULL.
if e.g. string1 IS NULL then the result will be NULL, too.

what I do here is:

IF (string1 IS NULL) THEN
string1 = '';
IF (string2 IS NULL) THEN
string2 = '';
result = string1 || string2;

HTH,
MArkus