C - Character Input and Character Output

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Introduction

You can read a single character from the keyboard and store it in a variable of type char using the scanf() function with the format specifier %c: 

char ch = 0;
scanf("%c", &ch); // Read one character

To write a single character to the command line with the printf() function, you use the format specifier, %c: 

printf("The character is %c\n", ch);

You can output the numeric value of a character: 

printf("The character is %c and the code value is %d\n", ch, ch);

This statement will output the value in ch as a character and as a numeric value.

Demo

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
      char first = 'T';
      char second = 63;

      printf("The first example as a letter looks like this - %c\n", first);
      printf("The first example as a number looks like this - %d\n", first);
      printf("The second example as a letter looks like this - %c\n", second);
      printf("The second example as a number looks like this - %d\n", second);
      return 0;/*  w  w w .  j a  va2  s  . co m*/
}

Result

You initialize the first variable with a character constant and the second variable with an integer.

The next four statements output the value of each variable in two ways: 

printf("The first example as a letter looks like this - %c\n", first);
printf("The first example as a number looks like this - %d\n", first);
printf("The second example as a letter looks like this - %c\n", second);
printf("The second example as a number looks like this - %d\n", second);

%c conversion specifier converts the contents of the variable as a single character.

%d specifier interprets it as an integer.

The numeric values that are output are the ASCII codes for the corresponding characters.

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