Character Constant vs String Constant

Character Constant vs String Constant

Character constants and string constants are both used to represent textual data in Java, but they have distinct characteristics and usage:

Character Constant vs String Constant

Character Constant:

  • A character constant, also known as a character literal, represents a single character enclosed within single quotes (‘’ ‘’).
  • It can only contain a single character, such as a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or special character.
  • Examples of character constants: ‘A’, ‘7’, ‘%’, ‘ ‘ (space), ‘\n’ (newline).
  • Character constants are of the primitive data type ‘char’.
  • They occupy 16 bits of memory and are represented using Unicode encoding.

String Constant:

  • A string constant, also known as a string literal, represents a sequence of characters enclosed within double quotes (‘” “’).
  • It can contain zero or more characters, forming a string of text.
  • Examples of string constants: “Hello”, “Java”, “123”, “” (empty string), “Special characters: \n \t \\”.
  • String constants are of the reference data type ‘String’.
  • They are implemented as objects of the ‘String’ class in Java’s standard library.
  • String constants are immutable, meaning their values cannot be changed after they are created.
  • They support various methods for string manipulation, such as concatenation, substring extraction, length calculation, and more.

In summary, the main differences between character constants and string constants in Java are their syntax, data types, and the number of characters they can represent. Character constants represent single characters enclosed in single quotes, while string constants represent sequences of characters enclosed in double quotes and are implemented as objects of the ‘String’ class.