Character constants in C

Character constants

Character literals are enclosed in single quotes, e.g., 'x' and can be stored in a simple variable of chartype.

A character literal can be a plain character (e.g., 'x'), an escape sequence (e.g., '\t'), or a universal character (e.g., '\u02C0').

There are certain characters in C when they are preceded by a backslash they will have special meaning and they are used to represent like newline (\n) or tab (\t). Here, you have a list of some of such escape sequence codes:

Escape sequence	Meaning
\\	\ character
\'	' character
\"	" character
\?	? character
\a	Alert or bell
\b	Backspace
\f	Form feed
\n	Newline
\r	Carriage return
\t	Horizontal tab
\v	Vertical tab
\ooo	Octal number of one to three digits
\xhh . . .	Hexadecimal number of one or more digits

Following is the example to show few escape sequence characters:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
   printf("Hello\tWorld\n\n");

   return 0;
}

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result:

Hello   World