A character literal represents a single character, and usually consists of a character in quotes, as in 'a'.

character-literal

' character '

single-character

simple-escape-sequence

hexadecimal-escape-sequence

unicode-escape-sequence

single-character

Any character except ' (U+0027), \ (U+005C), and new-line-character

simple-escape-sequence

\' \" \\ \0 \a \b \f \n \r \t \v

hexadecimal-escape-sequence

\x hex-digit hex-digit_opt hex-digit_opt hex-digit_opt

[Note: A character that follows a backslash character (\) in a character must be one of the following characters: ', ", \, 0, a, b, f, n, r, t, u, U, x, v. Otherwise, a compile-time error occurs. end note]

A hexadecimal escape sequence represents a single Unicode character, with the value formed by the hexadecimal number following "\x".

If the value represented by a character literal is greater than U+FFFF, a compile-time error occurs.

A Unicode character escape sequence (9.4.1) in a character literal must be in the range U+0000 to U+FFFF.

A simple escape sequence represents a Unicode character encoding, as described in the table below. Escape sequence Character name Unicode encoding \' Single quote 0x0027 \" Double quote 0x0022 \\ Backslash 0x005C \0 Null 0x0000 \a Alert 0x0007 \b Backspace 0x0008 \f Form feed 0x000C \n New line 0x000A \r Carriage return 0x000D \t Horizontal tab 0x0009 \v Vertical tab 0x000B

The type of a character-literal is char .