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Literals

Literals (strings) are character sequences surrounded by double quotes. Adjacent double-quote characters (besides white space) indicate multi-part literals, which are treated as one string.

For example:

"This is an example" " of a multi-part" " literal string."

The literal Escape character is the backslash (\). It is used as in the C/C++ programming languages, to enter the characters listed in the following table:

Sequence

Character

\a

Alert (ring terminal bell)

\b

Backspace

\f

Form feed

\n

New line

\r

Carriage return

\t

Horizontal tab

\v

Vertical tab

\\

Backslash

\"

Double quote

\xhh

Bit pattern, hexadecimal

\ooo

Bit pattern, octal

If the character following a backslash is not one of the sequences previously shown, the backslash is ignored.

For the octal bit pattern, ooo can be one, two, or three octal digits (from \0 to \377) when the MIF is specified in ISO8859-1 format, and from one to six octal digits (from \0 to \177777) when the MIF is in Unicode format.

For the hexadecimal bit pattern, hh can be one or two hex digits (from \x0 to \xff) when the MIF is specified in ISO8859-1 format, and from one to four hexdigits (from \x0 to \xffff) when the MIF is in Unicode format.