Java How to Program (early objects), 9/e

16.2 Fundamentals of Characters and Strings

Characters are the fundamental building blocks of Java source programs. Every program is composed of a sequence of characters that—when grouped together meaningfully—are interpreted by the Java compiler as a series of instructions used to accomplish a task. A program may contain character literals. A character literal is an integer value represented as a character in single quotes. For example, ‘z’ represents the integer value of z, and ‘\n’ represents the integer value of newline. The value of a character literal is the integer value of the character in the Unicode character set. Appendix B presents the integer equivalents of the characters in the ASCII character set, which is a subset of Unicode ...