What is the char
type in C and how should it be used.
Before we dive into these, let's have a quick glance at C types.
Types In C
Types are useful to us because they allow us to handle values in a specific way.
In the backend though, C uses types to determine how much memory to allocate for a given value.
C is very particular about memory and it needs to know the type of every value.
The Char type
This special type refers to printable and control character - basically every key on your keyboard!
Declaring Characters
The syntax for declaring a variable as a char
looks like this
char character = 'Z';
Note that single quotes
''
are used instead of double quotes""
Under the hood, all char
type translate to an integer. So you declare character like this
char c = 48
Or
char c = '0'
You can view the a table of all characters and their integer representation here
Char Operations
C provides a library for handling characters in an exciting way 🔥
You can use that library by including the ctype.h
library at the top of your script like this
#include <ctype.h>
Here are a few utilities the library gives you for free...
check is a character is lower case
char c = 'a';
if (islower(c))
// do something
islower
returns 1 if a character is lower case, and 0 if it's not.
check is a character is upper case
char c = 'A';
if (isupper(c))
// do something
isupper
returns 1 if a character is upper case, and 0 if it's not.
check is a character is an alphabet
char c = 'A';
if (isalpha(c))
// do something
isalpha
returns 1 if a character is an alphabet, and 0 if it's not.
check is a character is a digit
char c = '4';
if (isdigit(c))
// do something
isdigit
returns 1 if a character is a decimal number, and 0 if it's not.
check is a character is a digit or alphabet
char c = 'y';
if (isalphanum(c))
// do something
isalphanum
returns 1 if a character is a digit or alphabet, and 0 if it's not.
Bet you can guess what these functions do
ispunc
isspace
You can also convert characters to uppercase and lowercase using toupper
and tolower
respectively.
char c = 'A';
// Switch case
if (isupper(c))
c = tolower(c);
else if (islower(c))
c = toupper(c));
Spoilers
Emojis are also chars!
char damn = '🥵'
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