Literals

A literal is any string specified in single quotation marks. Literals can be used within a:

• TEXT subcommand to create fixed text for a page definition
• WHEN subcommand to define constant text for comparison

Literals can contain any characters in any position, except those that have special syntactic meanings. Single quotation marks may be used within a literal only if they are entered in pairs ('). PPFA translates a pair of single quotation marks into one quotation mark. For example, 'JOAN''S' yields JOAN'S.

A literal can continue for any number of lines. For example:

TEXT 'THIS IS ' 'A LITERAL' /* The four separated        */
     'THE TEXT SPANS'       /* text elements will produce*/
     'THREE LINES'  ;       /* one sequence of text      */
 
TEXT X'0101'                /* Hexadecimal literals      */
     X'ABAB'                /* spanning three lines      */
     X'BBBB'        ;
 
TEXT K'100,200'             /* kanji numbers             */
     K'321,400'     ;       /* specified sequentially    */

Invalid:

TEXT 'THIS IS'
    K'100,200'      ;       /* Mixing single-byte and
                               double-byte characters in one
                               field is not allowed */

A double-byte literal must be enclosed within apostrophe shift-out (X'7D0E') and shift-in apostrophe (X'0F7D').