How many bytes does a string take? A char?

Question

I'm doing a review of my first semester C++ class, and I think I missing something. How many bytes does a string take up? A char?

The examples we were given are, some being character literals and some being strings:

'n', "n", '\n', "\n", "\\n", ""

I'm particularly confused by the usage of newlines in there.

Answer 1

#include <iostream>
 
int main()
{
    std::cout << sizeof 'n'   << std::endl;   // 1
    std::cout << sizeof "n"   << std::endl;   // 2
    std::cout << sizeof '\n'  << std::endl;   // 1
    std::cout << sizeof "\n"  << std::endl;   // 2
    std::cout << sizeof "\\n" << std::endl;   // 3
    std::cout << sizeof ""    << std::endl;   // 1
}

• Single quotes indicate characters.
• Double quotes indicate C-style strings with an invisible NUL terminator.

\n (line break) is only a single char and so is \\ (backslash). \\n is just a backslash followed by n.