A character literal is a single character enclosed in single quotes, as in 'a'
.
A character that follows a backslash character (\
) in a simple-escape-sequence or hexadecimal-escape-sequence must be one of the following characters: '
, "
, \
, 0
, a
, b
, f
, n
, r
, t
, x
, v
. Otherwise, a compile-time error occurs.
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 |