Characters and Character Sets tMyn1 Characters and Character Sets The characters that can be used are the upper and lower case letters, A to Z and a to z, the digits 0 to 9, the space character, the control characters for new line, horizontal and vertical tabs, form feed and bell, plus the following special characters: _ { } [ ] # ( ) % : ;. ? * + - / ^ & | ~ ! =, \ ” ’ Those above are also referred to as symbols.

Characters and Character Sets tMyn2 The above definition of the characters that are used in C++ does not say how the characters are encoded. On a PC, these characters will typically be represented in the machine by 8-bit extended ASCII codes. Control characters can be entered by means of an escape sequence. An escape sequence is an indirect way of specifying a character, and always begins with a backslash.

Characters and Character Sets tMyn3 Escape SequenceControl Character \nnewline \thorizontal tab \vvertical tab \bbackspace \rcarriage return \fform feed \aalert-bell

Characters and Character Sets tMyn4 There are some other characters that are a problem to represent directly. For example since the backslash signals the start of an escape sequence, the only way to enter a backslash as a character constant is by using two successive backslashes:

Characters and Character Sets tMyn5 Escape SequenceCharacter \\backslash \’single quote \”double quote \?question mark