The C language uses a set of characters to represent various elements in a C program, including keywords, identifiers, operators, and special characters. The C character set is defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and Extended ASCII standards, which define the encoding of characters using 7-bit and 8-bit codes, respectively.
Here are the various characters in the C character set:
| Alphabets | A, B, C, D, ….., Y, Z a, b, c, d, ……., y, z |
| Digits | 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
| Special Symbols | ~ ‘ ! # @ % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = | \ { } [ ] : ; ” ` < > , . ? / |
C uses a subset of the ASCII character set, which consists of 128 characters, including uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. The extended ASCII character set, on the other hand, includes 256 characters, which includes additional characters such as accented letters, mathematical symbols, and other special characters.
It is essential to understand the C character set when writing programs, as improper use of characters or encoding can lead to syntax errors, compilation errors, or unexpected program behavior. Additionally, various C library functions use characters and character sets, such as string manipulation functions like strlen(), strcpy(), and strcat(). Therefore, having a good understanding of the C character set is essential for programming in C.