C++ Character Type

Introduction

Type char, referred to as character type, is used to represent a single character.

The type can store characters such as 'a', 'Z' etc.

The size of a character type is exactly one byte.

Character literals are enclosed in single quotes '' in C++.

To declare and initialize a variable of type char, we write: 

int main() 
{ 
    char c = 'a'; 
}

Now we can print out the value of our char variable: 

#include <iostream> 

int main() //w ww  . j  a va2 s.  c  om
{ 
    char c = 'a'; 
    std::cout << "The value of variable c is: " << c; 
}

Once declared and initialized, we can access our variable and change its value: 

#include <iostream> 

int main() /* w w w .java  2s .  c om*/
{ 
    char c = 'a'; 
    std::cout << "The value of variable c is: " << c; 
    c = 'Z'; 
    std::cout << " The new value of variable c is: " << c; 
}

The size of the char type in memory is usually one byte.

We obtain the size of the type through a sizeof operator: 

#include <iostream> 

int main() //from   w ww. ja va2s  .  c  om
{ 
     std::cout << "The size of type char is: " << sizeof(char)   
     << " byte(s)"; 
}

There are other character types

such as wchar_t for holding characters of Unicode character set,

char16_t for holding UTF-16 character sets.

A character literal is a character enclosed in single quotes.

Example: 'a', 'A', 'z', 'X', '0' etc.

Every character is represented by an integer number in the character set.

That is why we can assign both numeric literals and character literals to our char variable: 

int main() /*from w ww.  j  a  v  a  2 s. co  m*/
{ 
    char c = 'a'; 
    // is the same as if we had 
    // char c = 97; 
}

We can write: 

char c = 'a';

or we can write 

char c = 97;

which is the same, as the 'a' character in ASCII table is represented with the number of 97.




PreviousNext

Related