Learn C Programming - Char Data Type and ASCII Characters

This tutorial will explain the char data type. In C, the char is a 8-bit, 1 byte memory space used to represent printable and non-printable characters. Every individual English letter, number, and symbol on your screen such as A,B,C,X,Y,Z,0,1,2,3,#,$,% is represented by the char data type. In the early days of software development not much thought was given to "international" compatibility, and by that, I mean support for characters in languages that were foreign to the English language. A character encoding called Unicode came about because of this shortfall, but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.