Character Types

The char type stores a single character code unit. sizeof(char) is 1 byte by definition, and a byte is at least 8 bits (CHAR_BIT ≥ 8).

Character literals are enclosed in single quotes (e.g., 'A', '9', '$') and may include escape sequences such as '\n' for newline.

The exact narrow character encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, etc.) is implementation-defined; don't assume ASCII everywhere.

Examples of declaring and printing characters:

Common escapes include \n (newline), \t (tab), \a (bell), \' (single quote), \" (double quote), and \\ (backslash). You can also use hexadecimal (\x41) or octal (\101) escapes.

Many platforms use ASCII or a superset (like UTF-8) for the narrow execution character set, but the C++ standard does not require ASCII.

If you rely on numeric codes, prefer readable escape sequences (e.g., '\n' instead of 10).

In ASCII specifically, codes 0 - 31 are control characters and 32 - 126 are printable.

char may be signed or unsigned depending on the implementation. When passing a char to classification functions like std::isalpha, cast to unsigned char to avoid undefined behavior for negative values.

For Unicode text, prefer std::string (commonly UTF-8) or wider character types when appropriate:

Remember that a char stores a code unit, not necessarily a complete user-visible character (grapheme).