EXPLORATION 17

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Characters

In Exploration 2, I introduced you to character literals in single quotes, such as '\n', to end a line of output, but I have not yet taken the time to explain these fundamental building blocks. Now is the time to explore characters in greater depth.

Character Type

The char type represents a single character. Internally, all computers represent characters as integers. The character set defines the mapping between characters and numeric values. Common character sets are ISO 8859-1 (also called Latin-1) and ISO 10646 (same as Unicode), but many, many other character sets are in wide use.

The C++ standard does not mandate ...

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