Character Literal

A Character Literal is a Computer Programming Literal that represents a character.

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• Example(s):
  • a C Character Literal such as:
    • char str[] = "C"
    • char str[] = 'C'
  • a Python String Literal such as:
    • char1= "C"
    • char1= 'C'
  • Counter-Example(s):
  • a String Literal,
  • a Numerical Literal,
  • a XML Literal.
• See: Escape Sequence, Computer Programming, Computer Character, Source Code, Text Processing System, Sequence Delimiter, Pattern Recognition Task, Sequence-to-Sequence Network.

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References

2020

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_literal Retrieved:2020-3-1.
  • A character literal is a type of literal in programming for the representation of a single character's value within the source code of a computer program.

    Languages that have a dedicated character data type generally include character literals; these include C, C++, Java, and Visual Basic . 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 literals. 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 (or extended ASCII) scheme will use a single byte of computer memory, while a UTF-8 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.

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