4.6 Strings and Character Constants

A string enclosed in double quotes (") can be used only in conjunction with the DB directive and the MESSAGE/WARNING/ERROR directives. The string is taken literally, no escape sequences are recognized, and it is not NULL-terminated.

Quoted strings may be concatenated according to the ANSI C convention, i.e., "This is a " "long string" is equivalent to "This is a long string". This may be combined with Line Continuation to form long strings spanning multiple source lines.

Character constants are enclosed in single quotes ('), and can be used anywhere an integer expression is allowed. The following C-style escape sequences are recognized, with the same meaning as in C:

\ooo (ooo = octal number) and \xhh (hh = hex number) are also recognized.

Examples

.db "Hello\n" // is equivalent to:
.db 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\\', 'n'
.db '\0', '\177', '\xff'

To create the equivalent to the C-string "Hello, world\n", do as follows:

.db "Hello, world", '\n', 0