CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ccharint
chanpkr
chanpkr

Reputation: 915

How can you assign a character value to a integer type variable in C?

In C, 

...
int num = 'a';
...

My question is simple. How can you assign a character such as '0', 'a', 'b' to an integer type variable without getting any type error in C language?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 17825

Answers (5)

Ansh David
Ansh David

Reputation: 672

(sorry I read the question wrong and wrote a comment, my bad) ----->

int main()
{

    int num = 'a';
    printf("%c", num);
return 0;
}

OUTPUT

a

Upvotes: 0

Keith Thompson
Keith Thompson

Reputation: 263237

For historical reasons (mostly), character constants are of type int in C.

But even if they weren't, an initialization like

int num = 'a';

or an assignment like

num = 'a';

would still be perfectly legal. A value of any numeric type may be assigned to a variable of any (other) numeric type, and the value will be implicitly converted (which may involve a change of representation and/or a risk of overflow).

And char, along with its relatives unsigned char and signed char, are numeric types, specifically integer types.

Upvotes: 4

ST3
ST3

Reputation: 8946

Take a look here and here. Every character is a number, actually everything in computing is numbers, just some of them (depending on type and value) are rendered like characters.

For storing characters variable type should be char or wchar_t but it can be any other type, because all of them are just a numbers in memory.

Upvotes: 0

Valeri Atamaniouk
Valeri Atamaniouk

Reputation: 5163

You can. In C character constant is of type int. Which makes it a bit different with C++.

Upvotes: 0

glglgl
glglgl

Reputation: 91017

The character is only a representation of an integer value. For example, '0' can be written as 0x30 or 48, 'a' is an alternative for 0x61 or 97, etc.

So the assignment is perfectly valid.

Upvotes: 4

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