# character literal

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< cpp‎ | language

### Syntax

`'` c-char `'` | (1) |
`u8` `'` c-char `'` | (2) | (since C++17)
`u` `'` c-char `'` | (3) | (since C++11)
`U` `'` c-char `'` | (4) | (since C++11)
`L` `'` c-char `'` | (5) |
`'` c-char-sequence `'` | (6) |

where

- c-char is either

  - a character from the basic source character set minus single-quote (`'`), backslash (`\`), or the newline character,
  - escape sequence, as defined in escape sequences
  - universal character name, as defined in escape sequences

- c-char-sequence is a sequence of two or more c-chars.

1) narrow character literal or ordinary character literal, e.g. 'a' or '\n' or '\13'. Such literal has type char and the value equal to the representation of c-char in the execution character set. If c-char is not representable as a single byte in the execution character set, the literal has type int and implementation-defined value
2) UTF-8 character literal, e.g. u8'a'. Such literal has type char and the value equal to ISO 10646 code point value of c-char, provided that the code point value is representable with a single UTF-8 code unit. If c-char is not in Basic Latin or C0 Controls Unicode block, the program is ill-formed.
3) UCS-2 character literal, e.g. u'貓', but not u'🍌' (u'\U0001f34c'). Such literal has type char16_t and the value equal to the value of c-char in Unicode, if it is a part of the basic multilingual plane. If c-char is not part of the BMP, the program is ill-formed.
4) UCS-4 character literal, e.g. U'貓' or U'🍌'. Such literal has type char32_t and the value equal to the value of c-char in Unicode.
5) wide character literal, e.g. L'β' or L'貓'. Such literal has type wchar_t and the value equal to the value of c-char in the execution wide character set. If c-char is not representable in the execution character set (e.g. a non-BMP value on Windows where wchar_t is 16-bit), the value of the literal is implementation-defined.
6) Multicharacter literal, e.g. 'AB', has type int and implementation-defined value.

### Notes

Many implementations of multicharacter literals use the values of each char in the literal to initialize successive bytes of the resulting integer, in big-endian order, e.g. the value of '\1\2\3\4' is 0x01020304.

In C, character constants such as 'a' or '\n' have type int, rather than char.

### See also

C documentation for character constant

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