Basic Language Elements › Literals › Character String Literals › First Form

First Form

The first form is a sequence of characters that starts and ends with a string delimiter as specified by the STRDELIM= plan option. A string delimiter is either an apostrophe (') or a quotation mark (").

This form of string literal specifies the character string contained between the string delimiters. Two consecutive string delimiters are used to represent one string delimiter within the character string. The length of the character string must not be greater than 32720. Character string literals are delimiter tokens.

Some examples of character string literals are:

• 'YES'
• '32'
• 'DON''T CHANGE'

Dates, times, and timestamps are special character string literals with minimum length requirements as described in the following sections:

Dates

Dates must have a minimum of 10 characters. Formats for dates are as follows (where yyyy represents the year, mm the month, and dd the day):

• ISO is yyyy-mm-dd (International Standards Organization).
• USA is mm/dd/yyyy (IBM USA Standard).
• EUR is dd.mm.yyyy (IBM European Standard).
• JIS is yyyy-mm-dd (Japanese Industrial Standard).

You can vary the formats for dates as given previous as follows:

• Trailing blanks are the only other characters allowed.
• Leading zeros may be omitted from the month and day.

Times

Times must have a minimum of eight characters. Formats for times are as follows (where hh represents hours, mm minutes, and ss seconds):

• ISO is hh.mm.ss
• USA is hh:mm AM or PM
• EUR is hh.mm.ss
• JIS is hh:mm:ss

You can vary the formats for times as given previous as follows:

• You can omit leading zeros from the hour.
• Omission of seconds implies zero seconds.
• You may omit minutes from the USA format. Omission of minutes implies zero minutes.
• Trailing blanks are the only other characters allowed.

Timestamps

Timestamps must have a minimum of 26 characters. The format for timestamps in all cases is as follows (where yyyy-mm-dd represents the date, hh.mm.ss the time, and nnnnnn the microseconds):

• yyyy-mm-dd-hh.mm.ss.nnnnnn

You can vary the formats for times as given previous as follows:

• You may omit leading zeros from the month, day, and hour.
• Trailing blanks are the only other characters allowed.