4.11 Da Directive

The MPASM DA directive packs each sequence of two ASCII characters within a string into a 14-bit word in program memory.

Suggested Replacement

The PIC Assembler's DB directive inside a suitable psect performs a similar function, but note that packed strings are not supported by the PIC assembler and that each character will appear as a full byte in memory.

Consider placing the IRPC and/or DB directives in the data psect that is provided once you include <xc.inc>, for example:

#include <xc.inc>

PSECT data
myString:
  IRPC char,ABC
    DB   ’char’
  ENDM

but note that each character will consume one entire byte of memory.

Alternatively, you can define your own psect and allocate it to program memory. Ensure that the psect's space flag is set to 0 (the default value). It can be assigned an address by associating it with a suitable linker class (e.g. CONST for PIC18 devices, or STRCODE for other devices), or by explicitly positioning the psect using the linker's -P option (accessible from the driver using the -Wl option), as in the following PIC18 example.

PSECT romData,space=0,class=CONST
myString:
    DB   ’A’, 'B', 'C'