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Hello,
I spotted one piece of code where you as usual must indicate indice of an array to retrieve data. However, I saw some strange syntax.
The array was like 10-15 elements long and contained strings.
The statement was like this:
cout << number[2 - '0' - 1] << endl;
I don't understand what - '0' does.
Could anyone explain this?
'0' is a character with with non-zero integral value that depends on character set. Subtracting '0' is often used to convert a character that is a digit to the corresponding value (i.e. '1' - '0' is 1, '2' - '0' is 2, etc).
The actual value of of 1 - '0' (which is equivalent to 2 - '0' - 1) is implementation-defined. In practice, it depends on character set (ASCII, EBCDIC) your system supports.
If you have quoted the statement correctly (not left out quote characters, or something) then the author of the code is doing some hack that assumes the compiler supports a specific character set.