Combine two variables into one

I am having a problem with essay questions submitting the results into our LMS.

As a background, the course that I have created is for DSE and incorporates a series of questions that the user is to answer about their own use of DSE.  The questions are a series of Yes/No questions and offer a free text additional information.  In order to minimise the number of clicks the user has to make and to incorporate the questions as part of the learning I am getting the Yes/No questions and free text questions to write to variables and then using these variables to automatically complete the question slides and submit them.

The Yes/No questions are completing and submitting with no problem at all.  The essay questions will not submit automatically, this is something that I am aware of as a feature within articulate.  I have found that if you run a Java script that interacts with the free text content this allows the content to automatically submit, for example, I can look for all white spaces and replace them with a space.  My problem is that unless the Java script actually finds and replaces something the automatic submission will not work.

To get around this I was wondering if it is possible to combine two variables together in Storyline?  My though is to combine the users free text with a set variable of a a defined string of letters and numbers (that the user would not have typed themselves) I can then look for this specific entry and remove it using Java and allow the automatic submission to work.

Is anyone aware of a way of combining two variables into one?

Thanks