When can I omit curly braces in C?

Question

I\'m almost certain this has been asked before, but I can\'t find it being answered anywhere.

When can I omit curly braces in C? I\'ve seen brace-less return

Answer 1

You can omit them when there's a single statement you're executing:

for(...)
 printf("brackets can be omited here");

if(...)
 printf("brackets can be omited here");
else
 printf("brackets can be omited here too");

etc.. You can always add them in, it never hurts and help to clarify the scope, but you're pretty safe. The only "catch" I can think of is if you attempt to make a declaration in that scope (which is useless by the way):

if(...)
  int a = 5;

This will cause an error, but that's because you can perform a single statement without curly brackets, not a declaration. Important distinction.

Technically speaking, you can even do more than one operation without brackets if they're concatenated with the , operator... not that I advice doing it, just worthy of note:

if(...)
    value++, printf("updated value with brackets");

And to your edit, you can see in the java specification that the rules are the same. I linked specifically to the if section, but you can see after the if it's expected a statement, thus you can skip the curly brackets.