why getchar() in C has return type int while we are reading

[saurabh_embedded]

hi friends,

why read and write operations in FILE is done with int, but atually we are reading char from the file.thus wasting 3 bytes(in linux)/one byte(inTC) in reading one byte data.

thanks,

 

[cookey]

The reason is that getchar() needs to report some abnorml state. For example, read error or end of file (EOF = -1). In this case the returned value is not 0~255. It is not possible to represent such cases with char type.