Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Reference

~ Special character

The tilde (~) is an escape character that causes Progress 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 Table 2. In a procedure, a tilde followed by something other than the items in Table 2 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 Table 2 are case sensitive.

Table 2: Entering special characters in the Procedure Editor

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.
~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