5.1.2 Data Directive

The .data indicates that the output of the assembly code following should be placed at the end of the .data (initialized data) section.

# The following symbols (D1 and D2) will be placed in
# the initialized data section.
.data
D1:   .long 0x12345678   # 4 bytes
D2:   .byte 0xFF         # 1 byte

The linker collects initial values for section .data (and other sections defined with the data attribute) and creates a data initialization template. This template can be processed during application start-up to transfer initial values into memory. For C applications, a library function is called for this purpose automatically. Assembly projects can utilize this library by linking with the libpic32 library. For more information, see 10.4.3 Run-Time Library Support.