Forums Scripts & Popups adding a space to a string

I tried to add a space to a string with:

var %abc = %abc $+ ,_

where _ is the space I want to add. How do I do this?

Unfortunately you cannot append a space to a variable, unless either
1. the variable already ends in a space (ie you can add a second trailing space, with %abc = %abc $+ $chr(32) )
or
2. the variable doesn't exist/is empty (so you can do var %abc = $chr(32) )

There various ways around this limitation. One of them is something like this:

var %abc = %abc $+ , Z

Z is just a dummy character. Next time you need to reference that variable, you can do it with $left(%abc,-1), which returns all but the rightmost character (Z here).

I'm pretty sure however that you can eliminate the need to append a space by rearranging your script suitably. For example in this case, I'm assuming you want to append a space so that later you can do something like %abc $+ two and have the result "one, two" (assuming %abc was initially "one, "). Instead of doing this however, you can append a single comma at first (%abc = %abc $+ ,) and later do %abc = %abc two. The end result would be the same.

Alternatively, you can also use $addtok as long as you aren't going to have duplicate items in the list.

$addtok(%list,%new_item,44)

I admit I'm guessing here, but my guess is that you want the output to look something like if so, then use the $addtok suggestion (which will prevent the same name from occuring more than once), and when displaying the variable, use rather than
The spaces won't actually be stored in the variable, but will be added at the proper locations when the variable is displayed in the channel (presuming that's how and where you're sending the contents of the variable)

Thanks.