A quoted character string literal is a string of printable characters enclosed in single quotation marks. The maximum length of a character string is 1,024 octets. An unqualified character string must contain characters only from the literal character set of that session. The printable ASCII characters consist of: o Uppercase alphabetic characters: A-Z o Lowercase alphabetic characters: a-z o Numerals: 0-9 o Special characters: ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) - _ = + ` ~ [ ] { } ; : " \ | / ? > < . , For a list of the printable characters for DEC_MCS, see the OpenVMS documentation for users; for a list of printable characters for the other supported character sets, see the standard for that character set. Use a pair of single quotation marks to enclose a character string literal. If you use double quotation marks, an informational message is displayed, indicating that double quotation marks are nonstandard. Double quotation marks are passed as delimited identifiers if the quoting rules are set to ANSI/ISO SQL.
1 – Qualified
You can use a quoted character string literal qualified by the name of a character set. The character string must contain characters only from the named character set. A string literal qualified by a character set begins with an underscore (_), followed by the name of a supported character set, and a quoted string. No blank spaces are allowed outside of the literal. The following example shows how to qualify character strings with DEC_MCS and with DEC_KANJI: _DEC_MCS'Blue' _DEC_KANJI'Blue' You can use a national character string literal, which is a quoted character string literal qualified by the national character set. The character string must contain characters only from the national character set. A national character string literal begins with the letter N followed by a quoted string. No blank spaces are allowed outside of the literal. The following example shows how to qualify a character string with the national character set: N'Blue'