What data type can be used to hold any single character including numbers and non printing characters?

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Char Data Type (Visual Basic)

• Article
• 09/15/2021
• 2 minutes to read

In this article

Holds unsigned 16-bit (2-byte) code points ranging in value from 0 through 65535. Each code point, or character code, represents a single Unicode character.

Remarks

Use the Char data type when you need to hold only a single character and do not need the overhead of String. In some cases you can use Char(), an array of Char elements, to hold multiple characters.

The default value of Char is the character with a code point of 0.

Unicode Characters

The first 128 code points (0–127) of Unicode correspond to the letters and symbols on a standard U.S. keyboard. These first 128 code points are the same as those the ASCII character set defines. The second 128 code points (128–255) represent special characters, such as Latin-based alphabet letters, accents, currency symbols, and fractions. Unicode uses the remaining code points (256-65535) for a wide variety of symbols, including worldwide textual characters, diacritics, and mathematical and technical symbols.

You can use methods like IsDigit and IsPunctuation on a Char variable to determine its Unicode classification.

Type Conversions

Visual Basic does not convert directly between Char and the numeric types. You can use the Asc or AscW function to convert a Char value to an Integer that represents its code point. You can use the Chr or ChrW function to convert an Integer value to a Char that has that code point.

If the type checking switch (the Option Strict Statement) is on, you must append the literal type character to a single-character string literal to identify it as the Char data type. The following example illustrates this. The first assignment to the charVar variable generates compiler error BC30512 because Option Strict is on. The second compiles successfully because the c literal type character identifies the literal as a Char value.

Option Strict On

Module CharType
    Public Sub Main()
        Dim charVar As Char

        ' This statement generates compiler error BC30512 because Option Strict is On.  
        charVar = "Z"  

        ' The following statement succeeds because it specifies a Char literal.  
        charVar = "Z"c
    End Sub
End Module

Programming Tips

• Negative Numbers. Char is an unsigned type and cannot represent a negative value. In any case, you should not use Char to hold numeric values.

• Interop Considerations. If you interface with components not written for the .NET Framework, for example Automation or COM objects, remember that character types have a different data width (8 bits) in other environments. If you pass an 8-bit argument to such a component, declare it as Byte instead of Char in your new Visual Basic code.

• Widening. The Char data type widens to String. This means you can convert Char to String and will not encounter a System.OverflowException.

• Type Characters. Appending the literal type character C to a single-character string literal forces it to the Char data type. Char has no identifier type character.

• Framework Type. The corresponding type in the .NET Framework is the System.Char structure.

See also

• System.Char
• Asc
• AscW
• Chr
• ChrW
• Data Types
• String Data Type
• Type Conversion Functions
• Conversion Summary
• How to: Call a Windows Function that Takes Unsigned Types
• Efficient Use of Data Types

To this point, the fundamental data types we’ve looked at have been used to hold numbers (integers and floating points) or true/false values (Booleans). But what if we want to store letters or punctuation?

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Would you like a burrito? (y/n)";

    // We want the user to enter a 'y' or 'n' character
    // How do we do this?

    return 0;
}

The char data type was designed to hold a single character. A character can be a single letter, number, symbol, or whitespace.

The char data type is an integral type, meaning the underlying value is stored as an integer. Similar to how a Boolean value 0 is interpreted as false and non-zero is interpreted as true, the integer stored by a char variable are intepreted as an ASCII character.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it defines a particular way to represent English characters (plus a few other symbols) as numbers between 0 and 127 (called an ASCII code or code point). For example, ASCII code 97 is interpreted as the character ‘a’.

Character literals are always placed between single quotes (e.g. ‘g’, ‘1’, ‘ ‘).

Here’s a full table of ASCII characters:

Codes 0-31 are called the unprintable chars, and they’re mostly used to do formatting and control printers. Most of these are obsolete now. If you try to print these chars, the results are dependent upon your OS (you may get some emoji-like characters).

Codes 32-127 are called the printable characters, and they represent the letters, number characters, and punctuation that most computers use to display basic English text.

Initializing chars

You can initialize char variables using character literals:

char ch2{ 'a' }; // initialize with code point for 'a' (stored as integer 97) (preferred)

You can initialize chars with integers as well, but this should be avoided if possible

char ch2{ 97 }; // initialize with integer 97 ('a') (not preferred)

Warning

Be careful not to mix up character numbers with integer numbers. The following two initializations are not the same:

char ch{5}; // initialize with integer 5 (stored as integer 5)
char ch{'5'}; // initialize with code point for '5' (stored as integer 53)

Character numbers are intended to be used when we want to represent numbers as text, rather than as numbers to apply mathematical operations to.

Printing chars

When using std::cout to print a char, std::cout outputs the char variable as an ASCII character:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    char ch2{ 'a' }; // (preferred)
    std::cout << ch2; // cout prints character 'a'

    char ch2{ 98 }; // code point for 'b' (not preferred)
    std::cout << ch2; // cout prints a character ('b')


    return 0;
}

This produces the result:

ab

We can also output char literals directly:

cout << 'c';

This produces the result:

c

Inputting chars

The following program asks the user to input a character, then prints out the character:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Input a keyboard character: ";

    char ch{};
    std::cin >> ch;
    std::cout << "You entered: " << ch << '\n';

    return 0;
}

Here’s the output from one run:

Input a keyboard character: q
You entered q

Note that std::cin will let you enter multiple characters. However, variable ch can only hold 1 character. Consequently, only the first input character is extracted into variable ch. The rest of the user input is left in the input buffer that std::cin uses, and can be extracted with subsequent calls to std::cin.

You can see this behavior in the following example:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Input a keyboard character: "; // assume the user enters "abcd" (without quotes)

    char ch{};
    std::cin >> ch; // ch = 'a', "bcd" is left queued.
    std::cout << "You entered: " << ch << '\n';

    // Note: The following cin doesn't ask the user for input, it grabs queued input!
    std::cin >> ch; // ch = 'b', "cd" is left queued.
    std::cout << "You entered: " << ch << '\n';
    
    return 0;
}

Input a keyboard character: abcd
You entered: a
You entered: b

If you want to read in more than one char at a time (e.g. to read in a name, word, or sentence), you’ll want to use a string instead of a char. A string is a collection of sequential characters (and thus, a string can hold multiple symbols).

Char size, range, and default sign

Char is defined by C++ to always be 1 byte in size. By default, a char may be signed or unsigned (though it’s usually signed). If you’re using chars to hold ASCII characters, you don’t need to specify a sign (since both signed and unsigned chars can hold values between 0 and 127).

If you’re using a char to hold small integers (something you should not do unless you’re explicitly optimizing for space), you should always specify whether it is signed or unsigned. A signed char can hold a number between -128 and 127. An unsigned char can hold a number between 0 and 255.

Escape sequences

There are some characters in C++ that have special meaning. These characters are called escape sequences. An escape sequence starts with a ‘\’ (backslash) character, and then a following letter or number.

You’ve already seen the most common escape sequence: '\n', which can be used to embed a newline in a string of text:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "First line\nSecond line\n";
    return 0;
}

This outputs:

First line
Second line

Another commonly used escape sequence is '\t', which embeds a horizontal tab:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "First part\tSecond part";
    return 0;
}

Which outputs:

First part        Second part

Three other notable escape sequences are:
\’ prints a single quote
\” prints a double quote
\\ prints a backslash

Here’s a table of all of the escape sequences:

Here are some examples:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "\"This is quoted text\"\n";
    std::cout << "This string contains a single backslash \\\n";
    std::cout << "6F in hex is char '\x6F'\n";
    return 0;
}

Prints:

"This is quoted text"
This string contains a single backslash \
6F in hex is char 'o'

Warning

Escape sequences start with a backslash (\), not a forward slash (/). If you use a forward slash by accident, it may still compile, but will not yield the desired result.

Newline (\n) vs. std::endl

We cover this topic in lesson 1.5 -- Introduction to iostream: cout, cin, and endl.

What’s the difference between putting symbols in single and double quotes?

Single chars are always put in single quotes (e.g. 'a', '+', '5'). A char can only represent one symbol (e.g. the letter a, the plus symbol, the number 5).

Text put between double quotes (e.g. “Hello, world!”) is treated as a string. For now, you’re welcome to use string literals in your code:

std::cout << "Hello, world!"; // "Hello, world!" is a string literal

Best practice

Put stand-alone chars in single quotes (e.g. 't' or '\n', not "t" or "\n"). This helps the compiler optimize more effectively.

Avoid multicharacter literals

For backwards compatibility reasons, many C++ compilers support multicharacter literals, which are char literals that contain multiple characters (e.g. '56'). If supported, these have an implementation-defined value (meaning it varies depending on the compiler). Because they are not part of the C++ standard, and their value is not strictly defined, multicharacter literals should be avoided.

Best practice

Avoid multicharacter literals (e.g. '56').

Multicharacter literal support sometimes causes problems for new programmers. Consider the following simple program:

#include <iostream>

int add(int x, int y)
{
	return x + y;
}

int main()
{
	std::cout << add(1, 2) << '/n';

	return 0;
}

The programmer expects this program to print the value 3 and a newline. But instead, on the author’s machine, it outputs the following:

312142

The issue here is that the programmer accidentally used '/n' (a multicharacter literal consisting of a forward slash and an 'n' character) instead of '\n' (the escape sequence for a newline). The program first prints 3 (the result of add(1, 2)) correctly. But then it prints the value of '/n', which on the author’s machine had the implementation-defined value 12142.

Warning

Make sure that your newlines are using escape sequence '\n' , not multicharacter literal '/n'.

What about the other char types, wchar_t, char16_t, and char32_t?

wchar_t should be avoided in almost all cases (except when interfacing with the Windows API). Its size is implementation defined, and is not reliable. It has largely been deprecated.

As an aside…

The term “deprecated” means “still supported, but no longer recommended for use, because it has been replaced by something better or is no longer considered safe”.

Much like ASCII maps the integers 0-127 to American English characters, other character encoding standards exist to map integers (of varying sizes) to characters in other languages. The most well-known mapping outside of ASCII is the Unicode standard, which maps over 144,000 integers to characters in many different languages. Because Unicode contains so many code points, a single Unicode code point needs 32-bits to represent a character (called UTF-32). However, Unicode characters can also be encoded using multiple 16-bit or 8-bit characters (called UTF-16 and UTF-8 respectively).

char16_t and char32_t were added to C++11 to provide explicit support for 16-bit and 32-bit Unicode characters. char8_t has been added in C++20.

You won’t need to use char8_t, char16_t, or char32_t unless you’re planning on making your program Unicode compatible. Unicode and localization are generally outside the scope of these tutorials, so we won’t cover it further.

In the meantime, you should only use ASCII characters when working with characters (and strings). Using characters from other character sets may cause your characters to display incorrectly.

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