Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Literal string or character string is a data type in programming languages to represent text. Literal in programming, is a notation for specifying a constant value. Literal in logical expressions, e.g., DNFs is a variable or a negated variable. Literal in regular expressions and in descriptions of formal grammars is a synonym of terminal symbol (which is used in the formal language "literally", rather than generates a chain of substitutions). Literal in data compression is a chunk of input data that are represented "as is" in the compressed data. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.