PARSEC Technical Information

What if you want to produce literal double-quote marks to be printed in a string of text? – like this:

This is "double-quoted-text".

…or surround some text with single quotes? – like this:

This is 'singled-quoted-text'.

When you want a literal double-quote mark to appear in a literal text string, you can produce it in either of these two ways:

$ WRITE sys$output "This is ""double-quoted-text""."
                   |        ^^                  ^^ |   ! Use two double-quotes where you want one printed,
                   ^                               ^   ! and these two double-quotes delimit the literal string.

…or:

$ DQUOTE = """"   ! Create a variable whose content/value is a single double-quote mark!
$ WRITE sys$output "This is " + DQUOTE, "double-quoted-text" + DQUOTE + "."
$ ! This           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
$ !   concatenates several substrings (including the value of DQUOTE) into
$ !   a single string for printing.

…or:

$ DQUOTE = """"   ! Create a variable whose content/value is a single double-quote mark!
$ message = "This is " + DQUOTE, "double-quoted-text" + DQUOTE + "."
$ ! This    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
$ !   concatenates several substrings (including the value of DQUOTE) into
$ !   a single string variable for any purpose, including printing...
$ WRITE sys$output message

…or even:

$ DQUOTE = """"   ! Create a variable whose value is a single double-quote mark!
$ WRITE sys$output "This is ", DQUOTE, "double-quoted-text", DQUOTE, "."
$ ! The WRITE      ^^^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^^  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^^  ^^^
$ !   command takes several expressions (here, just literal strings) and
$ !   concatenates them itself for printing.

This suggests a similar way to produce a literal single-quote mark (tick) in text:

$ SQUOTE = "'"   ! Create a variable whose value is a single single-quote mark!
$ WRITE sys$output "This is ", SQUOTE, "singe-quoted-text", SQUOTE, "."

…or:

$ SQUOTE = "'"   ! Create a variable whose value is a single single-quote mark!
$ WRITE sys$output "This is " + SQUOTE + "singe-quoted-text" + SQUOTE + "."

…both produce:

This is 'single-quoted-text'.