Operators for Characters

Just a reminder, we are still not talking about cartoon characters. We are talking about symbols or letters which make up strings, i.e., the char variable type.

Interestingly, the same mathematical operations that work on integers also work on characters. For example :

char cLetter;

cLetter = 'a'; // cLetter has 'a' value now

cLetter = 'a' + 1 ; // cLetter has 'b' value now

The last line gives a result that uses the fact that the character is stored as an integer even though it is of type char. The standard (ASCII) value for ‘a’ is 97 and for ‘b’ is 98. Similarly ‘a’ – 3 will give ‘^’.

Although it is syntactically legal to multiply characters, it is almost never useful to do it.