Character Set in C language

Every language has its own set of the characters which are used to form a sentence to write a program/code, like how English has its set of characters like Alphabets, punctuation characters etc. We can only use the valid set of the characters defined by the programming language.

A C program is a set of statements. These statements are formed using words and these words are constructed using characters from C character set.

The characters in C are grouped into the following two categories:

Source character set

There are four types of Source Character Set in C:

#	Type	Characters
1	Letters	Upper and lower Alphabets (A-Z, a-z)
2	Digits	All Digits (0-9)
3	Special Characters	All Symbols: , . : ; ? ' " ! | \ / ~ _$ % # & ^ * - + < > ( ) { } [ ]
4	White Spaces	Space, Tabs, Carriage return, New line, Form feed

Execution character set

Certain ASCII characters are unprintable as they are not displayed on the screen. These characters perform other functions aside from displaying text. Examples: backspacing, moving to a newline, or beep sound.

They are mostly used in output statements.

Execution characters set are always represented by a backslash (\) followed by a character.

NOTE: Each one of character constants represents one character. However, they consist of two characters. These characters combinations are called as Escape sequence.

Few of popular escape sequence are:

Escape Sequence	Results
\0	Null
\b	Backspace
\t	Moves next to horizontal tab
\n	Moves to next line
\v	Moves next to vertical tab
\f	Moves initial position of next page
\r	Moves to the beginning of line
\"	Double quotes
\'	Apostrophe
\?	Question mark
\\	Backslash
\x	Hexadecimal number
\000	Octal number

---