38 Chapter 2
Unicode Escape Characters You can specify Unicode character literals using the universal character names,
and you can form a universal character name in one of two ways: the prefix
\u
followed by a 4-digit Unicode code point or the prefix
\U
followed by an
8-digit Unicode code point. For example, you can represent the
A
character
as
'\u0041'
and represent the beer mug character
🍺
as
U'\U0001F37A'
.
Format Specifiers The
printf
format specifier for
char
is
%c
. The
wchar_t
format specifier is
%lc
.
Listing 2-4 initializes two character literals,
x
and
y
. You use these vari-
ables to build a
printf
call.
#include int main() {
char x = 'M';
wchar_t y = L'Z';
printf("Windows binaries start with %c%lc.\n", x, y);
}
Windows binaries start with MZ.
Listing 2-4: A program that assigns several character-typed variables and prints them This program outputs Windows binaries start with MZ. Even though the
M is a narrow character
char
and the Z is a wide character,
printf
works
because the program uses the correct format specifiers.
N O T E The first two bytes of all Windows binaries are the characters M and Z, an homage to Mark Zbikowski, the designer of the MS-DOS executable binary file format. Boolean Types Boolean types have two states: true and false. The sole Boolean type is
bool
.
Integer types and the
bool
types convert readily: the
true
state converts to
1, and
false
converts to 0. Any non-zero integer converts to true, and 0 con-
verts to
false
.
