Single quotes vs. double quotes in C or C++

c, c++, char, string-literals, syntax

Solution

In C and in C++ single quotes identify a single character, while double quotes create a string literal. `'a'` is a single a character literal, while `"a"` is a string literal containing an `'a'` and a null terminator (that is a 2 char array).

In C++ the type of a character literal is `char`, but note that in C, the type of a character literal is `int`, that is `sizeof 'a'` is 4 in an architecture where ints are 32bit (and CHAR_BIT is 8), while `sizeof(char)` is 1 everywhere.

Problem

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