What is ASCII code?
Categories: C language
The full form of ASCII is the American Standard Code for information interchange. It is a character encoding scheme used for electronics communication. Each character or a special character is represented by some ASCII code, and each ascii code occupies 7 bits in memory.
In C programming language, a character variable does not contain a character value itself rather the ascii value of the character variable. The ascii value represents the character variable in numbers, and each character variable is assigned with some number range from 0 to 127. For example, the ascii value of 'A' is 65.
In the above example, we assign 'A' to the character variable whose ascii value is 65, so 65 will be stored in the character variable rather than 'A'.
We will create a program which will display the ascii value of the character variable.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
char ch; // variable declaration
printf("Enter a character");
scanf("%c",&ch); // user input
printf("\n The ascii value of the ch variable is : %d", ch);
return 0;
}
In the above code, the first user will give the character input, and the input will get stored in the 'ch' variable. If we print the value of the 'ch' variable by using %c format specifier, then it will display 'A' because we have given the character input as 'A', and if we use the %d format specifier then its ascii value will be displayed, i.e., 65.