Assign values to char in java [duplicate]

Question

I tried

int a = 100;
char c = a;  //doesn't work

but

char c = 100;  //does work

Does anybody know why?

Answer 1

Sentence

char a = 100;

will work, as every number in char stands for symbol in Unicode, from 0 to 65,536

For example

char a = 435;
System.out.println("Output: " + a);

gives output

Output: ?

As mentioned in answer below, type cast needed, when assigning int value to char, as int has wider values range (from -2147483648 to 2147483647) than char

For example,

long a = 1;
int b = a;

also impossible

Answer 2

The reason why char c = a; does not work is since char and int are incompatible types. char can store 2 bytes where as int can store 4 bytes. And so the java compiler does not allow the above operation since it can probably result in data loss while type conversion takes place.
To avoid the above issue, we can simply typecast int to char before assigning char c = (char) a;.

Answer 3

compiler won't do 'Widening or Automatic Type Conversion' for int to char. Reference