Is there a good way to concatenate a bunch of different field values? Trying to use ?join() but for whatever reason it keeps pulling in the “.” even if the description is blank.

<#assign desc = ["${item.item}", "${item.custcol_cmm_subscriber}", "${item.custcol_cseg_cmmproduct}", "${(item.description)!}"]>
                                            <Description xml:lang="en">${desc?join(" - ","",".")}</Description>