Character literals

Table of contents

• Overview
• Details
  • Escape Sequences
• References

Overview

A character literal represents a single Unicode code point at compile time. Character literals are delimited by single quotes ('), for example 'a'.

var a: char = 'a';
var newline: char = '\n';

Details

A character literal consists of a sequence of characters enclosed in single quotes (').

• The contents must represent precisely one Unicode code point.
• Hex escape sequences (\xHH) are supported but limited to values up to 0x7F (where the UTF-8 code unit and Unicode code point values are identical). Values 0x80 and above are disallowed in character literals to avoid ambiguity between arbitrary byte values and Unicode code points.
• Grapheme clusters (sequences of multiple code points representing a single visual character) are not supported in character literals.

Escape Sequences

Character literals support the same escape sequences as string literals:

Hexadecimal digits (H) in \x or \u escape sequences must use uppercase letters (for example, \x0A, not \x0a).

References

• Proposal #1964: Character Literals
• Proposal #6710: char redesign