Name 

Description 

Character Constants 

A character constant is one or more characters enclosed in single quotes, such as 'A', '+', or '\n'. In C, single-character constants have data type int. In C++, a character constant has type char. Multicharacter constants in both C and C++ have data type int.
To learn more about character constants, see the following topics.

• Three char types
• Escape sequences
• Wide-character and multi-character constants

 

Escape Sequences 

The backslash character (\) is used to introduce an escape sequence, which allows the visual representation of certain nongraphic characters. For example, the constant \n is used to the single newline character.
A backslash is used with octal or hexadecimal numbers to represent the ASCII symbol or control code corresponding to that value; for example, '\03' for Ctrl-C or '\x3F' for the question mark. You can use any string of up to three octal or any number of hexadecimal numbers in an escape sequence, provided that the value is within legal range for data type char (0 to 0xff). Larger... more 

The Three Char Types 

One-character constants, such as 'A', '\t' and '007', are represented as int values. In this case, the low-order byte is sign extended into the high bit; that is, if the value is greater than 127 (base 10), the upper bit is set to -1 (=0xFF). This can be disabled by declaring that the default char type is unsigned.
The three character types, char, signed char, and unsigned char, require an 8-bit (one byte) storage. By default, the compiler treats character declarations as signed. Use the –K compiler option to treat character declarations as unsigned. The behavior of C... more 

Wide-character And Multi-character Constants 

Wide-character types can be used to represent a character that does not fit into the storage space allocated for a char type. A wide character is stored in a two-byte space. A character constant preceded immediately by an L is a wide-character constant of data type wchar_t (defined in stddef.h). For example: