The following are the format and rules for basic national literals.
| Format 1: Basic national literals |
|---|
N"character-data" N'character-data' |
When the NSYMBOL(NATIONAL) compiler option is in effect, the opening delimiter N" or N' identifies a national literal. A national literal is of the class and category national.
When the NSYMBOL(DBCS) compiler option is in effect, the opening delimiter N" or N' identifies a DBCS literal, and the rules specified in DBCS literals apply.
To include the quotation mark or apostrophe used in the opening delimiter in the content of the literal, specify a pair of quotation marks or apostrophes, respectively. Examples:
N'This literal''s content includes an apostrophe' N'This literal includes ", which is not used in the opening delimiter' N"This literal includes "", which is used in the opening delimiter"
DBCS characters in the content of the literal must be delimited by shift-out and shift-in control characters.
The literal must contain at least one character. Each single-byte character in the literal counts as one character position and each DBCS character in the literal counts as one character position. Shift-in and shift-out delimiters for DBCS characters are not counted.
The source text representation of character-data is automatically converted to UTF-16 for use at run time (for example, when the literal is moved to or compared with a data item of category national).