Barcode Concatenation

We are using WMS 11.5.10.2.  We successfully concatenate subinventory and locator fields into a single barcode for a single scan - works great.  We use a % as the delimiter between fields.  We would like to be able to similarly concatenate other fields - for example, item # and quantity.  Has anyone been successful at this?  We received a copy of a presentation which suggests that a TAB can be used to combine fields into a single barcode - however, we have not been able to get this to work.