Character Assignment

The constant can be a Hollerith constant or a string of characters delimited by apostrophes (') or quotes ("). The character string cannot include the control characters Control-A, Control-B, or Control-C; that is, you cannot hold down the Control key and press the A, B, or C keys. If you need those control characters, use the char() function.

If you use quotes to delimit a character constant, then you cannot compile with the -xl option, because, in that case, a quote introduces an octal constant. The characters are transferred to the variables without any conversion of data, and may not be portable.

Character expressions which include the // operator can be assigned only to items of type CHARACTER. Here, the v is the name of a variable, substring, array element, or record field of type CHARACTER; e is a character expression.

Execution of a character assignment statement causes evaluation of the character expression and assignment of the resulting value to v. If the length of e is more than that of v, characters on the right are truncated. If the length of e is less than that of v, blank characters are padded on the right.