This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

  • Article

String data type

A fundamental data type that holds character information. A String variable is of either fixed or variable length, and contains one character per 2 bytes. Fixed-length strings are declared to be a specific length, and can contain 1 to approximately 64K (2^16) characters. Variable-length strings can be any length up to 2 billion (2^31) characters (approximately 64K (2^16) characters for Microsoft Windows version 3.1 and earlier), less a small amount of storage overhead. The type-declaration character is $ (ANSI character 36).