int c = getchar()?

Question

ok so im reading this book: The C Programming Language - By Kernighan and Ritchie (second Edition) and one of the examples im having trouble understanding how things are wor

Answer 1

The C char type is 8 bits, which means it can store the range of integers from (depending on if it is signed or not and the C standard does not dictate which it is if you do not specify it) either -128 to 127 or 0 to 255 (255 distinct values; this is the range of ASCII). getchar() returns int, which will be at least 16 bits (usually 32 bits on modern machines). This means that it can store the range of char, as well as more values.

The reason why the return type is int is because the special value EOF is returned when the end of the input stream is reached. If the return type were char, then there would be no way to signal that the end of the stream was encountered (unless it took a pointer to a variable where this condition was recorded).