One-argument form See also two-argument forms Format by specification,
Format by example
• , applied to any argument (character or numeric, simple or nested), converts it to characters according to the default display rules. (The formatted data may still look numeric since it is composed of the digits 0 to 9 together with suitable spaces and decimal points but it has the properties of character data and can be mixed in displays with other characters). The result is always a simple character array.
QTY „ 1760 2 ½ QTY (Asks the size of the data in QTY. 2 Answer is 2 numbers.)
QTY „ • QTY (Formats data in QTY.) ½ QTY (Asks the size of the data in QTY. 6 Answer is now 6 characters.)
'PRICE IS ',•22×1.15 (The numeric data is formatted and joins the PRICE IS 25.3 character data to form a simple character vector) DATA„(¼3) (2 2½¼4) 'TEXT' 100 DATA 1 2 3 1 2 TEXT 100 3 4 ½DATA 4 DATA„•DATA (Format preserves the appearance of an DATA array, but makes it into a simple 1 2 3 1 2 TEXT 100 character array) 3 4 ½DATA 2 24