String Data Handling   (from http://search.cpan.org/~mewp/DBD-Sybase/dbd-sybase.pod)

DBD::Sybase supports CHAR/VARCHAR/BINARY/VARBINARY, limited to 255 characters in length up to version 12.0x. As of 12.5 these datatypes can be up to 16K in size - but supporting the larger sizes requires that Open Client 12.5 or later be used. Note that the CHAR type is fixed length (blank padded).

Sybase automatically converts CHAR and VARCHAR data between the character set of the server (see the syscharset system table) and the character set of the client, defined by the locale setting of the client. The BINARY and VARBINARY types are not converted. UTF-8 is supported.

See the OpenClient International Developer's Guide in the Sybase OpenClient manuals for more on character set issues.
Strings can be concatenated using the + SQL operator.