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2.1.2 String Values

A value known at compile time to have string type is represented as an array of char. String values do not necessarily represent readable text strings and may contain arbitrary 8-bit data, including null bytes, control codes, and bytes with the high bit set. Thus, string values are not null-terminated strings, but rather opaque arrays of bytes.

SYSMIS, LOWEST, and HIGHEST have no equivalents as string values. Usually, PSPP fills an unknown or undefined string values with spaces, but PSPP does not treat such a string as a special case when it processes it later.

MAX_STRING, the maximum length of a string value, is defined in data/val-type.h.