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Alphanumericals or alphanumeric characters are any collection of number characters and letters in a certain language. Sometimes such characters may be mistaken one for the other. Merriam-Webster suggests that the term "alphanumeric" may often additionally refer to other symbols, such as punctuation and mathematical symbols. [1]
The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending of other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning, an "escape sequence". This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning ...
UTF-8 and Shift JIS are often used in C byte strings, while UTF-16 is often used in C wide strings when wchar_t is 16 bits. Truncating strings with variable-width characters using functions like strncpy can produce invalid sequences at the end of the string. This can be unsafe if the truncated parts are interpreted by code that assumes the ...
In the C standard library, abbreviated names are the most common (e.g. isalnum for a function testing whether a character is alphanumeric), while the C++ standard library often uses an underscore as a word separator (e.g. out_of_range).
Both character termination and length codes limit strings: For example, C character arrays that contain null (NUL) characters cannot be handled directly by C string library functions: Strings using a length code are limited to the maximum value of the length code. Both of these limitations can be overcome by clever programming.
C character classification is a group of operations in the C standard library that test a character for membership in a particular class of characters; such as alphabetic, control, etc. Both single-byte, and wide characters are supported.
In contrast, a character entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language) or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD). The format is the same as for any entity reference: &name;
For instance, the lexical grammar for many programming languages specifies that a string literal starts with a " character and continues until a matching " is found (escaping makes this more complicated), that an identifier is an alphanumeric sequence (letters and digits, usually also allowing underscores, and disallowing initial digits), and ...