C++ std::cout printing wierd characters when I enclose a string with single quotations

Question

when I tried std::cout << ', '; I got 11296, I know that I should've enclosed it with ", ", but why do I get the number?

Those are not "brackets". – Lightness Races in Orbit Jul 31 '15 at 10:06 — Lightness Races in Orbit, Jul 31 '15 at 10:06

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 31 '15 at 09:45

You got two characters in single quotes (comma and space).
The value of such multicharacter literals depends on your compiler etc.

In this case, the ASCII values are 44 and 32, and

11296 = 44 * 256 + 32

ie. both bytes together understood as 16bit integer

AlexD · Answer 2 · 2015-07-31T10:00:40.063

According to the standard (N4296, 2.13.3 Character literals, emphasis mine):

An ordinary character literal that contains more than one c-char is a multicharacter literal. A multicharacter literal, or an ordinary character literal containing a single c-char not representable in the execution character set, is conditionally-supported, has type int, and has an implementation-defined value.

"Conditionally-supported" is (1.3.5)

program construct that an implementation is not required to support

C++ std::cout printing wierd characters when I enclose a string with single quotations

2 Answers2