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ASCII Encoding and Typecasting in C

What is a ASCII ?

Computer stores data only in the form of 0 and 1. Have you ever wondered how it stores and understands characters like 'r', 'a','*', or '#' etc. It stores all these characters in the form of a binary number. Every character in C has a unique ASCII Code ( a numeric code) to identify each character. Below is the list of ASCII ranges of the different characters in C.

Characters	ASCII Ranges
A-Z	65-80
a-z	97-122
0-9	48-56
Special Characters like '#','@','-'	32–47 / 58–64 / 91–96 / 123–126

Typecasting

It is a technique to convert a value from one data type to another.


#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
  float f=3.14;
  int a=f;           

  int b=3;
  float r=b;

  printf("Value of a = %d",a);
  printf("Value of ar = %f",r);
}

Output

Value of a = 3
Value of r = 3.000000

Implicit Typecasting

In Implicit Type Conversion, the compiler automatically converts an integer(lower data type) to float(higher data type).


#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
  float f=5/2.0;
  printf("Result = %f",f);
}

Output

Result = 2.500000

In the above code, since one of the numbers is float the compiler automatically converts the second number into float(higher data type) and then performs float division.

Explicit Type Conversion

In Explicit Type Conversion, the user instructs the compiler to convert from one data type to another(higher to lower data type or lower to higher data type).

Let's take a look at the following example.


#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
  float f=5/2;
  printf("Result = %f",f);
}

Output

2.000000

We expected the output to be 2.5. However, since both 5 and 2 are integers, the compiler performed integer division which gives the result as 2.

To get the correct output, we write the following code.


#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
  float f=(float)5/2;
  printf("Result = %f",f);
}

Output

Result = 2.500000

Here, we explicitly converted 5 to float. Now, since one of the numbers is float, the compiler automatically converts 2 to float and then float division is performed that gave the result as 2.5.

How to get ASCII code of a character ?

To get the ASCII Code of a given character, we can do something like :


#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
  char ch;
  printf("Enter a character : ");
  scanf("%c",&ch);
  printf("ASCII Code of %c = %d",ch,ch);
}

We can get the ASCII code of any character by typecasting. Now, ch is of char type but if we convert it to an integer, it gives its ASCII code as result.

Output 1

Enter a character : R
ASCII Code of R = 82

Output 2

Enter a character : #
ASCII Code of R = 35