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CHAR type variables
CHAR (character) types are suitable for storing a single letter each. The original CHAR uses codes from the ancient ASCII character mapping table. This table contains a mix of 255 different characters (letters, numbers, control characters, graphic symbols). Its advantage is that it requires only 1 byte, but its disadvantage is that the character set is quite limited; for example, Hungarian or Chinese accented characters are mostly excluded.
The extended version of CHAR is WCHAR (wide-character), which has a 2-byte length but can be used more broadly with its (UNICODE) UCS-2 mapping. Up to 65,535 character mappings can be encoded with 16 bits; UNICODE does not fully utilize this range.
When declaring an operand of data type WSTRING you can define its length using square brackets (for example WSTRING[10]). If you do not specify a length, the length of the WSTRING is set to 254 characters by default.
| Type | Name | Bit | Code table | Value range HEX | Value range DEC | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHAR | character | 8 | ASCII | 0 .. FF | 0 .. 255 | 'P', CHAR#'P' |
| WCHAR | Wide character | 16 | UCS-2 | $0000 - $D7FF | 0 .. 55.295 | WCHAR#'Ő' |
Special characters
A character string can also contain special characters. The escape character $ is used to identify control characters, dollar signs and single quotation marks.
| Character | Hex | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| $L or $l | 000A | Line feed | '$LText', '$000AText' |
| $N | 000A and 000D | Line break The line break occupies 2 characters in the character string. | '$NText', '$000A$000DText' |
| $P or $p | 000C | Page feed | '$PText', '$000CText' |
| $R or $r | 000D | Carriage return (CR) | '$RText','$000DText' |
| $T or $t | 0009 | Tab | '$TText', '$0009Text' |
| $$ | 0024 | Dollar sign | '100$$t', '100$0024t' |
| $' | 0027 | Single quotation mark | '$'Text$'','$0027Text$0027 |