adding to letters

[peter huff]

Hi, in C you can add a number to a letter and it will change the letter, ie A+1=B (not exactly cos you have to take into account asci). How would I go about doing the same thing in java?

[marc weber]

I don't know C, but from what you've posted, it sounds like it's basically the same, since a primitive char is fundamentally a numeric value that you can perform arithmetic on. Just note that a literal char needs to be enclosed by single quotes...

class AddChars {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    char c = 'A' + 1;
    System.out.println(c);
  }
}

[Layne Lund]

In other words, Java works (mostly) the same way that C does in this regard.

Layne
[ January 29, 2006: Message edited by: Layne Lund ]

[Guy Allard]

If you are running Java or C in a USS subsystem under zOS, with the system using the EBCDIC character set, you are not always going to get what you expect with code like this. Same with OS400.

Guy

[peter huff]

ok.... dont really understand that. I was under impression most systems used asci, i mean ebcidic is english and therefore i didnt think in common use as asci was more standardised???

[Jesper de Jong]

Peter, yes, most systems use ASCII to encode characters. What Guy was trying to tell you is that not all systems use ASCII. There are some operating systems that use EBCDIC, for example. There might be other systems that use other encodings.

So adding 1 to a character does not give you the same result on all systems. The result depends on the character encoding that the system uses.