char

The char type stores a 1-byte character value (or integer with value from -128 to 127). Character literals are written in single quotes, like this: 'A' (for multiple characters - strings - use double quotes: "ABC").

Just like everything else on a computer, characters are stored as numbers. You can see the specific encoding in the ASCII chart. This means that it is possible to do arithmetic on characters, in which the ASCII value of the character is used (e.g. 'A' + 1 has the decimal value 66, since the ASCII value of the capital letter A in decimal is 65). See the Serial.println() documentation for more information about how characters are converted into numbers.

The char datatype is a signed type, meaning that it encodes numbers from -128 to 127. For an unsigned type, which stores values from 0 to 255, just use the type unsigned char (two words).

Example

// The following two lines are equivalent, using the ASCII
// character encoding:
char c = 'A';
char c = 65;

See Also

• int
• Arrays (a string is just an array of chars)
• Serial.println()

License and Attribution

This documentation page was adapted from the Arduino Reference Documentation, which is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.