But DATA stores the values in EEPROM - don't know if it matters in this case but it needs to be considered.
The topic "Strings in codespace" has come up a couple of times, Darrel had some routines for it but his site is no longer available for apparent reasons. There's a repository somewhere on the forum, perhaps it's there. Anyway, here's the thread with the discussion around his code. There are other threads as well.

/Henrik.