String Literals

String literals appear as a part of expressions. Provide commands for String literals.

String literals are also sometimes called character literals or text literals. When a string literal appears as part of AN expression in this documentation, it is indicated by the word TEXT. The syntax for single-line string literals is:

"character_string"

or

'character_string'

The syntax for multi-line string literals is:

[[character_string]]

In all cases, character_string is a combination of alphabetic characters, numeric characters, punctuation marks, spaces, and tabs.

• A single-line string literal must be enclosed in single (' ') or double (" ") quotes.

• Two adjacent quotes with no character string between represent an empty string.

• Newline characters (either CR or NL) can only be used with the multi-line string syntax.

Note that, to include a single quotation mark (or an apostrophe) in a text string that is already surrounded by single quotes, you must enter the inside quotation mark twice. For example, to put the apostrophe in the word that's, use two apostrophe/single-quote characters in a row:

'And that''s the truth.'

Similarly, to put a double quote inside a string delimited by double quotes, use a pair of double quotes inside the string, for example:

"He said ""No!"""

Sybase CEP Engine treats the doubled characters as single characters in this situation.

Some examples of valid string literals are:

'abc123'
'abc 123'
'It''s a good idea.'
"20030"
"abc123"
"abc 123"
"""What?"" he asked."

Internationalization impacts string literals. All the literals in the preceding list are 7-bit ASCII literals. But this:

'αβγ123'

is also a literal.