Convert a character digit to the corresponding integer in C

Is there a way to convert a character to an integer in C?

For example, from '5' to 5?

Solution 1:

As per other replies, this is fine:

char c = '5';
int x = c - '0';

Also, for error checking, you may wish to check isdigit(c) is true first. Note that you cannot completely portably do the same for letters, for example:

char c = 'b';
int x = c - 'a'; // x is now not necessarily 1

The standard guarantees that the char values for the digits '0' to '9' are contiguous, but makes no guarantees for other characters like letters of the alphabet.

Solution 2:

Subtract '0' like this:

int i = c - '0';

The C Standard guarantees each digit in the range '0'..'9' is one greater than its previous digit (in section 5.2.1/3 of the C99 draft). The same counts for C++.

Solution 3:

If, by some crazy coincidence, you want to convert a string of characters to an integer, you can do that too!

char *num = "1024";
int val = atoi(num); // atoi = ASCII TO Int

val is now 1024. Apparently atoi() is fine, and what I said about it earlier only applies to me (on OS X (maybe (insert Lisp joke here))). I have heard it is a macro that maps roughly to the next example, which uses strtol(), a more general-purpose function, to do the conversion instead:

char *num = "1024";
int val = (int)strtol(num, (char **)NULL, 10); // strtol = STRing TO Long

strtol() works like this:

long strtol(const char *str, char **endptr, int base);

It converts *str to a long, treating it as if it were a base base number. If **endptr isn't null, it holds the first non-digit character strtol() found (but who cares about that).

Solution 4:

To convert character digit to corresponding integer. Do as shown below:

char c = '8';                    
int i = c - '0';

Logic behind the calculation above is to play with ASCII values. ASCII value of character 8 is 56, ASCII value of character 0 is 48. ASCII value of integer 8 is 8.

If we subtract two characters, subtraction will happen between ASCII of characters.

int i = 56 - 48;   
i = 8;