Text strings in VHDL are generally limited to fixed-length character arrays. That makes sense because VHDL describes hardware, and generic-length strings require dynamic memory.
To define an array of strings, you have to allocate space at compile-time for the highest number of strings you want to store. And even worse, you must decide on the strings’ max length and pad every occurrence to that number of characters. The code below shows an example usage of such a construct.