QSTRING[n]

A data-compressed variation of STRING that uses only 6-bits per character to reduce storage requirements for large strings. The character set is limited to capital letters A-Z, the numbers 0-9, the blank space, and the following set of special characters:

! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _

If n is omitted, the QSTRING is variable length to the size needed to contain the result of a cast or passed parameter. You may use set indexing into any QSTRING to parse out a substring.

The upper size limit for any QSTRING value is 4GB.

Example:

QSTRING12 CompanyName := 'LEXISNEXIS';
        // uses only 9 bytes of storage instead of 12
OUTPUT(CompanyName)

See Also: STRING, LENGTH, TRIM, Set Ordering and Indexing.