[peterfirefly]

sizeof() returns the number of "units" that something -- an expression or a type -- takes up. What do you think those units are?

They are literally defined as "characters". sizeof(char) is always 1.

Your confusion (besides the pointer thing) is that 'x' is a funny way to write an int, not a char.

[nequo]

It seems to me that `sizeof` returns the number of bytes that the thing takes up in memory. For example:

  int numbers[] = {1, 2, 3};  // sizeof(numbers) = 12

> Your confusion (besides the pointer thing) is that 'x' is a funny way to write an int, not a char.

Yes, this might be it. So the way to get a `char` value that contains "c" is to use type coercion and write it as `(char) 'c'`. This changes the representation in memory so that it now takes up only one byte rather than four, right?

[_kst_]

`(char)'c'` is an expression of type char.

Its size is one byte -- but the size of an expression isn't really relevant, since it's (conceptually) not stored in memory.

You can assign the value of an expression to an object, and that object's size depends on its declared type, not on the value assigned to it. The cast is very probably not necessary.

    char c1 = 'c'; // The object is one byte; 'c' is converted from int to char
    int  c2 = 'c'; // The object is typically 4 bytes (sizeof (int))

The fact that character constants are of type int is admittedly confusing -- but given the number of contexts in which implicit conversions are applied, it rarely matters. If you assign the value 'c' to an object of type char, there is conceptually an implicit conversion from int to char, but the generated code is likely to just use a 1-byte move operation.