To use special characters in C programming, you must understand their working and how to incorporate them into your code. This article is a detailed guide to help you in understanding the use of special characters in C programming.
How to Use Special Characters in C Programming
The special characters in C programming could be any character whether it’s an apostrophe (‘), a new line (n), or any other character. These characters are useful in C because they allow you to represent certain control characters and escape sequences that can’t be typed directly as a character in the code. You can use these characters in your C program by adding an escape character (\) before the special character inside the printf() function.
Some commonly used special characters with their name are listed in the table below:
| Character | Name | Result |
| \\ | Backslash | \ |
| \’’ | Double quotes | ‘’ |
| \’ | Single quotes | ‘ |
| \n | Ecape Character | Line |
| \0 | Backlash Zero | Null |
| \t | Escape Sequence | Tab |
If you want to use the (“) character in your C code, you can use it inside the program using (\$). The following simple code illustrates the above scenario.
int main() {
char str[] = "Hello "LinuxHint" Users.";
printf("%s", str);
return 0;
}
The above C code uses the escaped double quotes (“) special character within a string to print the word “LinuxHint” with quotes.
If you want to use \n special character to move the text onto the next line, you can use the following code:
int main() {
char str[] = "Hello LinuxHint Users.\n";
printf("%s", str);
return 0;
}
In the above code, \n character is used that moves the text LinuxHint onto the next line.
Let’s have another example that uses the backlash “\\”.
int main() {
char str[] = "\\Hello LinuxHint Users.";
printf("%s", str);
return 0;
}
The above code will print the message with a backslash \.
Let’s use the same example by adding the \t with the string.
int main() {
char str[] = "Hello LinuxHint Users.\t";
printf("%s", str);
return 0;
}
This will cause the output to indent with a horizontal tab.
In this way, you can use any special character you want with C programming by adding the escape character followed by the special character you want to print.
Conclusion
Special characters are important symbols in C programming that allow you to perform specific tasks or represent certain values. By adding an escape character (\) right before the special character, you can use any special character you want in your C program. The above-mentioned guidelines help you understand how to use special characters in C programming, with examples of special characters such as quotation marks and new lines.
