Printing the size of char in C

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when I am printing sizeof('b'); in c it is printing 4, But it should print 1 because b is not a integer ,it is a char
but when I am declaring char b; then its ascii value will also take 4 byte but then its print 1; or we can say that in that case ascii value will NOT take 4 byte after being an integer also HOW??

What I have tried:

#include<stdio.h>
 int main(){
 printf("the size of b is %d",sizeof('b')); 

 }

Posted 4-Sep-18 3:30am

kavinderrana121

Updated 4-Sep-18 4:47am

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W∴ Balboos, *GHB* · Answer 1 · 2018-09-04T03:50:00

Do an experiment with your current setup.

Declare a byte, char, short int, int.
Now run sizeof() on them.

Your system can have characters default to sizes other than one byte.

from a google search for "sizeof(char) in c":

Quote:
It depends what is the character and what encoding it is in: An ASCII character in 8-bit ASCII encoding is 8 bits (1 byte), though it can fit in 7 bits. An ISO-8895-1 character in ISO-8859-1 encoding is 8 bits (1 byte). A Unicode character in UTF-8 encoding is between 8 bits (1 byte) and 32 bits (4 bytes).Jan 31, 2011

MadMyche · Answer 2 · 2018-09-04T04:21:00

This appears to the result of using a literal ('a') as the argument vs assigning 'a' to a variable first.

Character literals
In C, character literals such as 'a' have type int, and thus sizeof('a') is equal to sizeof(int).
In C++, character literals have type char, and thus sizeof('a') is equal to sizeof(char).
This difference can lead to inconsistent behavior in some code that is compiled as both C and C++.

Source: Incompatabilities between C and C++: Character literals[^]

KarstenK · Answer 3 · 2018-09-04T04:47:00

In your code the 'b' isnt a char, but an unnamed variable. And this is defaulting the compiler to an int.

In programming it is best to be as precise as possible because compiler and linker may understand your code a little different than you and like to optimize it. I made lately (and again) the experience that some code in destructors is never excuted, because the optimizing process thrown it away.

Printing the size of char in C

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