"Too many characters in character literal error"

I'm struggling with a piece of code and getting the error:

Too many characters in character literal error

Using C# and switch statement to iterate through a string buffer and reading tokens, but getting the error in this line:

case '&&':

case '||':

case '==':

How can I keep the == and && as a char?

6 Answers

This is because, in C#, single quotes ('') denote (or encapsulate) a single character, whereas double quotes ("") are used for a string of characters. For example:

var myChar = '='; var myString = "=="; 

Here's an example:

char myChar = '|'; string myString = "||"; 

Chars are delimited by single quotes, and strings by double quotes.

The good news is C# switch statements work with strings!

switch (mytoken) { case "==": //Something here. break; default: //Handle when no token is found. break; } 

You cannot treat == or || as chars, since they are not chars, but a sequence of chars.

You could make your switch...case work on strings instead.

A char can hold a single character only, a character literal is a single character in single quote, i.e. '&' - if you have more characters than one you want to use a string, for that you have to use double quotes:

case "&&": 

I believe you can do this using a Unicode encoding, but I doubt this is what you really want.

The == is the unicode value 2A76 so I belive you can do this:

char c = '\u2A76'; 

I can't test this at the moment but I'd be interested to know if that works for you.

You will need to dig around for the others. Here is a unicode table if you want to look:

I faced the same issue. String.Replace('\\.','') is not valid statement and throws the same error. Thanks to C# we can use double quotes instead of single quotes and following works String.Replace("\\.","")