ASCII Value in C

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns a unique numerical value (an integer) to each printable and control character in the English alphabet and some other special characters. The ASCII standard uses a 7-bit binary code to represent these characters, allowing for a total of 128 different characters.

In C programming, you can find the ASCII value (also called ASCII code) of a character using the int data type because the ASCII value is represented as an integer. You can do this by simply casting the character to an int data type.

Here's a simple example in C to illustrate the use of ASCII values:


#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    char character;

    printf("Enter a character: ");
    scanf("%c", &character);

    // Get the ASCII value of the character
    int asciiValue = (int)character;

    // Display the character and its ASCII value
    printf("Character: %c\n", character);
    printf("ASCII Value: %d\n", asciiValue);

    return 0;
}

In this program, we:

  1. Declare a character variable to store the user's input.
  2. Prompt the user to enter a character using printf and read the character using scanf.
  3. Convert the character to its ASCII value by casting it to an int.
  4. Display both the original character and its ASCII value using printf.

When you run this program and input a character, it will display the character you entered and its corresponding ASCII value. For example, if you input 'A', it will display:


Enter a character: A
Character: A
ASCII Value: 65

This demonstrates how you can use C to find and display the ASCII value of a character.