Question

I have question about character data type in c++.

Suppose i have the following  code.

int main(){

char x= '123';

cout<

}

if i change x to something else, say '17', i get output as 7.

if i change it to something else, like 7 . i get same output  7. again

if i change it again to  something else , like '1', i get 7 again

but if i change it to '11' , i get 1. or to '1839', i get 9.

Why is the code giving same output for some different values and vise versa .

In all cases, i was expecting the out to be same as the character inside the single quotation and how is the first code different the one below??

int main(){

char x= 123;

cout<

}

Thank you

Answer 1

In Programming Language C++, we can assign multi characters to a character data type and which value will be assigned to the character variable depends upon the implementation.

A multi characters literal is an ordinary character literal that contains multiple characters.

Internally character data type is working as an integer data type. ASCII code is assigned to each of the character.

For example:

ASCII code of 'A' is 65

ASCII code of 'a' is 97

When we initialise a character type variable with a character literal then that literal is converted into an integer value and then stored.

Most of the implementation of multi character literals uses successive bytes to store the multi character literal or integer values.

A multi-character literal has implementation-defined value and type int.

So, we can't say that the last character will be assigned always because it is implementation dependent value but most of the implementation assign the last character only.

Let us see the below statement:

char x= 123;

The above statement will assign the value 123 the the character variable and it will work fine. When we will print the value assigned to the character then it will print the character which has ASCII code 123 and character '{' has the ASCII code 123.

So, the below statement:

cout<<x;

will print '{' as an output.

For example:

char x= 65;

cout<<x; //this statement will print 'A' because 65 is the ASCII value of 'A'

char x= 97;

cout<<x; //this statement will print 'a' because 97 is the ASCII value of 'a'