More than one character in single quotes?

SAn

I accidentally printed more than one character in single quotes:

std::cout << 'abc' << std::endl; //Output: 6382179

What that mean?

Badestrand

http://www.torsten-horn.de/techdocs/ascii.htm
=>
0x61 0x62 0x63
=>
6382179

edit: One situation comes in my mind where it could be useful: When you want to read a bmp-file's header, the bmp-file must always start with 'BM'. So you can read the first two bytes of the file into a "short"-variable and compare it to 'BM' (Not a very realistic situation though, since there are lots of libraries loading bmp-files but nonetheless...)

Why no compile error?

Badestrand

C++??? schrieb:

Why no compile error?

Because it's valid C++ :p

Does it make any sence? who needs this?

Badestrand

C++??? schrieb:

Does it make any sence? who needs this?

For example, for micro-optimizations in some special cases:

bool isGetOrSet( const char* s )
{
    const unsigned int val = *reinterpret_cast<unsigned int*>( s );
    return val=='get\0' || val=='set\0';
}

...
bool yeah_its_valid = isGetOrSet( "set" );

edit: Ups, endianess, write '\0teg' and '\0tes'.