3.10.4 Character Literals

A character literal is expressed as a character or an escape sequence, enclosed in ASCII single quotes. (The single-quote, or apostrophe, character is \u0027.)

A character literal is always of type char.

CharacterLiteral:

	' SingleCharacter '

	' EscapeSequence '

SingleCharacter:

	InputCharacter but not ' or \

The escape sequences are described in §3.10.6.

As specified in §3.4, the characters CR and LF are never an InputCharacter; they are recognized as constituting a LineTerminator.

It is a compile-time error for the character following the SingleCharacter or EscapeSequence to be other than a '.

It is a compile-time error for a line terminator to appear after the opening ' and before the closing '.

The following are examples of char literals:

'a'
'%'
'\t'
'\\'
'\''
'\u03a9'
'\uFFFF'
'\177'
''
''

Because Unicode escapes are processed very early, it is not correct to write '\u000a' for a character literal whose value is linefeed (LF); the Unicode escape \u000a is transformed into an actual linefeed in translation step 1 (§3.3) and the linefeed becomes a LineTerminator in step 2 (§3.4), and so the character literal is not valid in step 3. Instead, one should use the escape sequence '\n' (§3.10.6). Similarly, it is not correct to write '\u000d' for a character literal whose value is carriage return (CR). Instead, use '\r'.

In C and C++, a character literal may contain representations of more than one character, but the value of such a character literal is implementation-defined. In Java, a character literal always represents exactly one character.