Section 2.1.3.1. Text string

(a) A sequence of non-white-space characters on a single line excluding a leading underscore 〈_〉 (ASCII 95).

Examples:

(b) A sequence of characters on a single line containing the leading digraph 〈wspace〉〈'〉 and the trailing digraph 〈'〉〈wspace〉. 〈'〉 is a single-quote character (ASCII 39) and 〈wspace〉 is white space.

Examples:

Note that the use of the 〈'〉 character in the text string that is bounded by a 〈'〉 character is not precluded unless it is immediately followed by 〈wspace〉. The leading and trailing digraphs serve to delimit the string and do not form part of the data. In the above example the value associated with the text field 'light blue' is light blue.

(c) A sequence of characters on a single line containing the leading digraph 〈wspace〉〈"〉 and the trailing digraph 〈"〉〈wspace〉. 〈"〉 is a double-quote (ASCII 34) character and 〈wspace〉 is white space.

Examples:

The use of the 〈"〉 character in the text string that is bounded by a 〈"〉 character is not precluded unless it is immediately followed by 〈wspace〉. The leading and trailing digraphs serve to delimit the string and do not form part of the data.

The text strings of type (a), (b) and (c) cannot contain line-breaking characters, and therefore cannot span multiple lines. There can be more than one text string per line if each value is preceded by a data name, or the values are part of a looped list (see Section 2.1.3.5).

(d) A sequence of lines starting with 〈terminate〉〈;〉 and finishing with 〈terminate〉〈;〉, where 〈;〉 is the semicolon character (ASCII 59).

Example:

The requirement that the 〈;〉 character be the first character on the line does not preclude the presence of other characters on the same line, in as much as it does not violate the STAR File structure.

The leading and trailing digraphs delimit the text field and do not form part of the data. The character sequence between the digraphs, including any line-breaking characters, constitutes the value of the text field. The value associated with the above example is 〈blank〉School〈blank〉of〈blank〉CSSE〈terminate〉〈blank〉〈blank〉UWA (note in particular that the 〈terminate〉 character preceding the final ; delimiter is not part of the value).