You can use either double quotes or single quotes to delimit string literals in EQUEL/Pascal, as long as the same delimiter is used at the beginning and the end of any one string literal.

Whichever quote mark you use, you can embed that quote mark as part of the literal itself by doubling it. For example:

To include the backslash character as part of a string, precede it with another backslash.

When continuing an EQUEL statement to another line in the middle of a string literal, use a backslash immediately prior to the end of the first line. In this case, the backslash and the following newline character are ignored by the preprocessor, so that the following line can continue both the string and any further components of the EQUEL statement. Any leading spaces on the next line are considered part of the string. For example, the following are legal EQUEL statements:

You cannot use the Pascal concatenation operator (+) to continue string literals over lines. If the preprocessor needs to continue a string literal on the next line, it will generate the correct Pascal code.