Addition of characters and integers in Sysout

[Soniya Ahuja]

Hello,

I can't understand why 111/112/114 or any such number is being printed for the following line of code
System.out.println(12+'c');

If I print this
System.out.println(Character.getNumericValue('c'));
The output remains constant but I can't understand what happens in the former print statement. I was expecting compile time error or exception, but I get a perfectly working piece of code.

Please explain!

[Rob Spoor]

A char is actually nothing more than a numeric value that is treated differently when printed. For instance, 'A' is 65. As such, 12 + 'A' would be 77, and that would be printed.

[Antany Vasanth]

Hello Sonia,

Here ASCII value of c = '99' whenever (12+'c') is considered as arithmetic addition operation. Hence the ASCII value of 'c'(99) is added with 12 which results 111.

Its very similar like if you assign int a = 'c'; then a value become 99. if you try to print a, 99 will be printed.

In the above, char is implicitly casted into int. Hence compilation error wont occur.

Here Character.getNumericValue('c') method returns the int value that the specified Unicode character represents.

Regards,
Antany

[Soniya Ahuja]

Thanks everyone for the replies. This explains the answers to me now