Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

useful when you want to display a compound string that contains text in several different styles, as we'll show you in

an example later in this section.

Although automatic string conversion can handle the creation of most compound strings, there are still a few

situations when you need to define compound strings explicitly. If you want to declare an exported compound string

variable or override one of the properties of a compound string, you need to use the compound string literal syntax.

An explicit compound string definition takes the following form:

compound_string (string_expression,

[, right_to_left = boolean_expression ]

[, separate = boolean_expression ] )

A compound_string literal begins with the compound_string keyword and is followed by a single or

double−quoted string and the optional properties. You can set the writing direction of the compound string with the

right_to_left property; the default value of this property is taken from the writing direction string's character

set. The separate property specifies whether or not a separator component is added to the end of the compound

string. The default value is false, which means that a separator is not added.

Unlike with NULL−terminated strings, placing a newline character in a compound string does not produce a

multi−line string. A line break in a compound string is indicated by a separator component, which you add by setting