The tilde (~) is an escape character that causes the AVM to read the following character literally. A tilde followed by three octal digits represents a single character. Use it as a lead-in to enter the special characters shown in the following table. In a procedure, a tilde followed by something other than the items in the following table is ignored. For example, "~abc" is treated as "abc". (This may not work as expected when passing parameters to an include file.) The items in the following table are case sensitive.
| Sequence | Interpreted as | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| ~" | " | Use within quoted strings as an alternative to two quotes (""). |
| ~' | ' | Use within quoted strings as an alternative to two apostrophes (''). |
| ~~ | ~ | – |
| ~\ | \ | – |
| ~{ | { | – |
| ~nnn | A single character | Where nnn is an octal value between 000 and 377. All three digits are required. Do not use this to represent non-ASCII characters if you are using different codepages for compiling and runtime, or have different codepages between different runtime clients. Instead use the ~u or ~U sequences. |
| ~t | Tab character | Octal 011 |
| ~r | Carriage return | Octal 015 |
| ~n | New line / Line feed | Octal 012 |
| ~E | Escape | Octal 033 |
| ~b | Backspace | Octal 010 |
| ~f | Form feed | Octal 014 |
| ~unnnn | A single character | Where nnnn is a hexadecimal value representing a Unicode character in the Basic Multilingual Plane. All four digits are required. |
| ~Unnnnnn | A single character | Where nnnnnn is a hexadecimal value representing a Unicode character beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane. All six digits are required. |