Introduction to Characters

The main data types used in C, including numbers, strings, and arrays, will each have its own chapter in this book, but a more basic type, the character, deserves a little discussion as well. Unlike the number types, character variables can be used for non-numeric characters such as letters and punctuation.

Creating a character variable is easy:

char initial;

Assigning values to character variables is only slightly more complicated, requiring the use of single (straight) quotation marks:

char right_answer;
right_answer = 'D';

Notice that a simple char variable contains only a single character. In the next section you'll learn how to make longer chars.

To print the value of a character using the printf() function, you'll need to use the %c marker.

To demonstrate this, you'll add a char variable to the existing C file.

To work with character variables

1.	Open var3.c (Script 2.3) in your text editor or IDE.
2.	After declaring the other two variables, declare a char called gender (Script 2.4): char gender; /* M or F */ Script 2.4. This application now uses a third variable type for storing the user's gender as a single character. This creates a single variable of type char. A comment is added indicating the values the variable is expected to take.
3.	After initializing the other two variables, assign a value to gender: gender = 'F'; Remember that character variables can be assigned only a single character as a value and that this value is placed within single quotation marks.
4.	Add a third print statement for this new variable: printf ("Your gender was listed as %c. ", gender); There's nothing terribly new here except for the fact that the %c formatting mark is used as a placeholder for the gender variable.
5.	Save the file as var4.c.
6.	Compile and run the application (Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5. Character variables—like gender here—can be printed just like numbers. [View full size image]