The Fortran 95 standard specifies in Part 2 (ISO/IEC 1539-2:2000) varying length character strings. While GNU Fortran currently does not support such strings directly, there exist two Fortran implementations for them, which work with GNU Fortran. They can be found at http://www.fortran.com/iso_varying_string.f95 and at ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/ISO_VARYING_STRING/.