ASCII value in C

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding scheme used for electronics communication.

In C programming language, a character variable does not contain a character value itself rather the ASCII value of the character variable.

In this lesson, you will learn how to find the ASCII value of a character.

Each character or a special character is represented by some ASCII code, and each ASCII code occupies 7 bits in memory.

The ASCII value represents the character variable in numbers. For example, the ASCII value of ‘A’ is 65.

Example – Display the ascii value of the character

#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;  
}  

• C code: We use format specifier here to give the numeric value of character. Here %d is used to convert character to its ASCII value.
• In the above example, first user will give the character input, and then 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.

The above output shows that the user gave the input as ‘A’, and after giving input, the ascii value of ‘A’ will get printed, i.e., 65.