What are Character Literals in C++?

In C++, character literals are the constant values, which are assigned to variables of the character data type. These values are represented by a character enclosed within single quotation marks.

There are mainly five types of character literals:

• Narrow-character literals
• Wide-character literals.
• UTF-8 character literals
• UTF-16 character literals
• UTF-32 character literals
  

Narrow-character Literals

These character literals are of type char, which represents single-byte character. It stores characters from the ASCII table, which includes values ranging from 0 to 127.

char ch = 'A';

Here, the character 'A' has an ASCII value of 65. In C++ each individual character has its own unique ASCII value, so when a character is stored in a char variable, it actually holds its numeric (ACII) value internally.

Wide-character Literals

These character literals are of type wchar_t, which represents characters from larger character sets, such as Unicode. Unlike narrow-character literals (char), which occupies only 1 byte, wchar_t occupies 2 or 4 bytes, which depends on the platform where it allows to store a much wider range of characters beyond the basic ASCII table.

// here 'L' prefix denotes a wide-character literal
wchar_t ch = L'A';

In this L'A' still represents the ASCII value 65, but wchar_t allows support for characters which are outside the standard ASCII range such as characters from other languages or special symbols.

UTF-8 Character Literals

These character literals are of type char in the previous version and char8_t in C++20 and later. They are used to represent characters encoded in the UTF-8 format, which is widely used encoding for Unicode characters. They also used for special symbols in web and cross-platform systems

// here u8 indicates that the character is encoded in UTF-8 format
char8_t ch = u8'A'; 
// can also write with auto, which automatically deduced its type as char8_t in C++20 and later
auto ch = u8'A'; 

UTF-16 Character Literals

UTF-16 character literals are of type char16_t, which are introduced to handle characters encoded in the UTF-16 format; it is used to represent a larger set of Unicode characters than ASCII. This is used in windows APIs and for Unicode text like Chinese characters etc.

// here u specifies UTF-16 character literal
char16_t ch = u'A';  
// you can also use 'auto' to automatically deduce the type
auto ch = u'A'; 

UTF-32 Character Literals

UTF-32 character literals are of type char16_t, which are introduced to represent characters encoded in the UTF-32 format, it is used to represent a broader range of Unicode characters, which includes range outside the basic ASCII or even UTF-16 range like emojis.

// here u specifies UTF-32 character literal
char32_t ch = U'A';
// you can also use 'auto' to automatically deduce the type
auto ch = U'A';  

Example of Characters Literals

Here is the following example code representing different types of character literals and their encodings:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    // Narrow character literal (ASCII-based)
    char ch1 = 'H';  
    cout << "Narrow character: " << ch1 << endl;

    // UTF-8 character, this is commonly used for special symbols in web and cross-platform systems
    auto ch3 = u8"¡";  // inverted exclamation for Spanish
    cout << "UTF-8 character: " << ch3 << endl;

    return 0;
}

Output

For this make sure your compiler supports unicode and wide-character output.

Narrow character: H
UTF-8 character: ¡

Comparison Table