Size of character a in C C

Question

What is the size of character in C and C     As far as I know the size of char is 1 byte in both C and C     In C    include  lt stdio h gt  int main         printf  Size of char    d n   sizeof char        return 0      In C      include  lt iostream gt  int main         std  cout  lt  lt   Size of char      lt  lt  sizeof char   lt  lt    n       return 0      No surprises  both of them gives the output   Size of char   1  Now we know that characters are represented as  a   b   c          So I just modified the above codes to these   In C    include  lt stdio h gt  int main         char a    a       printf  Size of char    d n   sizeof a        printf  Size of char    d n   sizeof  a         return 0      Output   Size of char   1 Size of char   4   In C      include  lt iostream gt  int main         char a    a       std  cout  lt  lt   Size of char      lt  lt  sizeof a   lt  lt    n       std  cout  lt  lt   Size of char      lt  lt  sizeof  a    lt  lt    n       return 0      Output   Size of char   1 Size of char   1   Why the sizeof  a   returns different values in C and C

User · Accepted Answer

In C  the type of a character constant like  a  is actually an int  with size of 4  or some other implementation-dependent value   In C    the type is char  with size of 1  This is one of many small differences between the two languages

User · Answer

In C the type of character literals are int and char in C    This is in C   required to support function overloading  See this example   void foo char c        puts  char      void foo int i        puts  int      int main         foo  i        return 0      Output   char

User · Answer

In C language  character literal is not a char type  C considers character literal as integer  So  there is no difference between sizeof  a   and sizeof 1     So  the sizeof character literal is equal to sizeof integer in C   In C   language  character literal is type of char  The cppreference say s      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    So  in C   character literal is a type of char  so  size of character literal in C   is one byte   Alos  In your programs  you have used wrong format specifier for sizeof operator   C11   7 21 6 1  P9        If a conversion specification is invalid  the behavior is   undefined 275  If any argument is not the correct type for the   corresponding conversion specification  the behavior is undefined    So  you should use  zu format specifier instead of  d  otherwise it is undefined behaviour in C

User · Answer

As Paul stated  it s because  a  is an int in C but a char in C     I cover that specific difference between C and C   in something I wrote a few years ago  at  http   david tribble com text cdiffs htm

[c++] Size of character ('a') in C/C++

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