HP C/iX Reference Manual (31506-90011)

26 Chapter2

Lexical Elements

String Literals

A string literal is a sequence of zero or more characters enclosed in double quotation

marks.

Syntax

string-literal:

[s-char-sequence]

s-char-sequence:

s-char

s-char-sequence s-char

s-char:

any character in the source character set except

double quote, backslash, or newline

escape-sequence

Description

You can type special characters in a character string literal using the escape sequence

notation described previously in the section on character constants. The double quote

character ( ' ) must be represented as an escape sequence if it is to appear inside a string

literal. Represent the string 'he said "hi"' with

"he said \"hi\""

A character string has static storage duration and type array of char.

The actual characters stored in a character string literal are the exact characters speciﬁed.

In addition, a null character (\0) is automatically added to the end of each character string

literal by the compiler. Note that the null character is added only to string literals. Arrays

of characters are not terminated with the extra character.

Character string literals that have no characters consist of a single null character.

Note that a string literal containing one character is not the same as a character constant.

The string literal "A" is stored in two adjacent bytes with the A in the ﬁrst byte and a null

character in the second byte; however, the character constant 'A' is a constant with type

int and the value 65 (the ASCII code value for the letter A).

ANSI C allows the usage of wide string literals. A wide string literal is a sequence of zero

or more multibyte characters enclosed in double-quotes and preﬁxed by the letter L. A wide

string literal has static storage duration and type "array of wchar_t." It is initialized with

the wide characters corresponding to the given multibyte characters.

Examples

L"abc##def"