Char to int conversion in C

Solution 1:

Yes, this is a safe conversion. C requires it to work. This guarantee is in section 5.2.1 paragraph 2 of the latest ISO C standard, a recent draft of which is N1570:

Both the basic source and basic execution character sets shall have the following members:
[...]
the 10 decimal digits
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
[...]
In both the source and execution basic character sets, the value of each character after 0 in the above list of decimal digits shall be one greater than the value of the previous.

Both ASCII and EBCDIC, and character sets derived from them, satisfy this requirement, which is why the C standard was able to impose it. Note that letters are not contiguous iN EBCDIC, and C doesn't require them to be.

There is no library function to do it for a single char, you would need to build a string first:

int digit_to_int(char d)
{
 char str[2];

 str[0] = d;
 str[1] = '\0';
 return (int) strtol(str, NULL, 10);
}

You could also use the atoi() function to do the conversion, once you have a string, but strtol() is better and safer.

As commenters have pointed out though, it is extreme overkill to call a function to do this conversion; your initial approach to subtract '0' is the proper way of doing this. I just wanted to show how the recommended standard approach of converting a number as a string to a "true" number would be used, here.

Solution 2:

Try this :

char c = '5' - '0';

Solution 3:

int i = c - '0';

You should be aware that this doesn't perform any validation against the character - for example, if the character was 'a' then you would get 91 - 48 = 49. Especially if you are dealing with user or network input, you should probably perform validation to avoid bad behavior in your program. Just check the range:

if ('0' <= c &&  c <= '9') {
    i = c - '0';
} else {
    /* handle error */
}

Note that if you want your conversion to handle hex digits you can check the range and perform the appropriate calculation.

if ('0' <= c && c <= '9') {
    i = c - '0';
} else if ('a' <= c && c <= 'f') {
    i = 10 + c - 'a';
} else if ('A' <= c && c <= 'F') {
    i = 10 + c - 'A';
} else {
    /* handle error */
}

That will convert a single hex character, upper or lowercase independent, into an integer.