You use double quotes to delimit string literals in EQUEL/COBOL. You can embed double quotes as part of the literal itself by doubling it. For example:

The COBOL single quote character delimiter is also accepted by the preprocessor and is converted to a double quote.

To continue an EQUEL statement to additional lines, use the backslash (\) character at the end of the first line. Any leading spaces on the next line are considered part of the string. Therefore, the continued string should start in column 1 on the next line in the area that would be considered the Sequence Number Area on COBOL lines.

For example, the following is a legal EQUEL statement:

Note that any string literals that are generated as output by the preprocessor will follow COBOL rules.