Farhanaaz

• Dec 12th, 2006

 

 Because as characters are identified by ASCII values, ascii values are intergers. In c integers require require 2 bytes of memory to be stored

Rajeev

• Jan 6th, 2007

 

in C constants will occupy 2 bytes minimum.so a char constant will occupy 2 bytes in which one byte is useless which is filled with zero's.

mprashant

• Feb 19th, 2007

 

This is wrong one ..
please try this code as-

int main(){
printf("size of char const %dn",sizeof(const char));
getchar();
}

this prints
size of char const 1

abhimanipal

 Profile Answers by abhimanipal 

• Jul 15th, 2009

 

int main()
{
  char c='A';
  const char a= 'C';
  printf("%dn",sizeof(c));
  printf("%dn",sizeof(a));

  return 0;
}

The output of this one is

1
1

kbjarnason

 Profile Answers by kbjarnason 

• Jul 1st, 2010

 

They don't.

char a;  - a is a char variable, which requires one byte's storage.

'a' - 'a' is a character constant, which is of type _int_, which requires the same storage as an int... which can be 1, 2, 4, 16, 64, 512 or some other number of bytes.

In C, char and byte are equivalent in storage terms; one char equals one byte, storage-wise.  However, that can be anywhere from a (minimum) 8 bits wide to as wide as you'd like to go.  Several systems use 32 bit chars, shorts, ints and longs, for example, all of which take one byte, a 32-bit-wide byte.