A symbol (also called an identifier) is a name that identifies something, for example program and debugger variables, macros, keywords, and registers.

Symbols can be up to 1024 characters in length. The first character in a symbol must be alphabetic, an underscore _, or the at sign @. The valid characters in a symbol include upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numeric characters, the dollar sign $, at sign @, and underscore _. Other symbolic characters cannot be used in symbols. The debugger distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase characters in a symbol. A symbol is therefore matched by the following regular expression:

[a-zA-Z_@][a-zA-Z_@$0-9]{0,1023}

Regular expressions are described in Mastering Regular Expressions.

If your compiler or assembler creates symbols that contain characters that are invalid in RealView Debugger symbols, prefix the symbol name with an @ and enclose the rest of the name in double quotes " to reference it, for example @"!parser". You cannot access a symbol including a double quote character in its name.