A character literal is a type of literal in programming for the representation of a single character's value within the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

. Languages that have a dedicated character data type generally include character literals; these include C, C++,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, and

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic (.NET), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (classic), the original Visual Basic suppo ...

. Languages without character data types (like Python or PHP) will typically use strings of length 1 to serve the same purpose a character data type would fulfil. This simplifies the implementation and basic usage of a language but also introduces new scope for programming errors. A common convention for expressing a character literal is to use a single quote (') for character literals, as contrasted by the use of a double quote (") for

string literal string literal or anonymous string is a literal for a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally "bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where , "foo ...

s. For example, 'a' indicates the single character a while "a" indicates the string a of length 1. The representation of a character within the computer memory, in storage, and in data transmission, is dependent on a particular character encoding scheme. For example, an

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

(or

extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

) scheme will use a single byte of computer memory, while a

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

scheme will use one or more bytes, depending on the particular character being encoded. Alternative ways to encode character values include specifying an integer value for a code point, such as an ASCII code value or a Unicode code point. This may be done directly via converting an integer literal to a character, or via an

escape sequence In computer science, an escape sequence is a combination of characters that has a meaning other than the literal characters contained therein; it is marked by one or more preceding (and possibly terminating) characters. Examples * In C and ma ...

References

{{Reflist, 30em Character encoding Data types

See also

References