Character literal

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,[1] and Visual Basic.[2] Languages without character data types (like Python[3] or PHP[4]) 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.

## See also

* String literal
* XML Literals
* C syntax § Character constants - for multicharacter literals

## References

1. ↑ "Primitive Data Types (The Java™ Tutorials > Learning the Java Language > Language Basics)". https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/datatypes.html.
2. ↑ "Data Type Summary (Visual Basic)". https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/47zceaw7.aspx.
3. ↑ "5. Built-in Types — Python 2.7.12 documentation". https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html.
4. ↑ "PHP: Types - Manual". http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.php.

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