smallest individual units of Program

In a passage of text, individual words and punctuation

marks are called tokens. Similarly, in C programming the
smallest individual units are known as C tokens.

C language has six types of tokens, and programs are

written using these tokens and the syntax of the
language.
 Special
Keywords Identifiers Constants Strings Symbols Operators
Keywords serves as the building blocks for a program statements. All
keywords have a fixed meaning and cannot be changed.

 Keywords cannot be used as normal identifier names.

Few Examples of keywords used in C are listed below

 int
 break
 goto
 char
 switch
 void
Identifier refers to the name of variables, functions and arrays. These are
user defined names and consists of a sequence of letters and digits.

 Both uppercase and lowercase letters can be used, and c language is case
sensitive. A special symbol underscore ( _ ) is also permitted.

Rules For Identifiers

 First character must be an alphabet.
 must consist of only letters, digits or underscore.
 Should not be a keyword and should not have any blank space.

 Example:- int num;

char name;
Where num and name are identifier names.
Constants refers to fixed values that do not change during the execution of
a program.

Basic types of C constants are shown in the flowchart

Constants

Numeric Character
Constants Constants

Integer Real Single String

Constants Constants character constants
constants
Strings are nothing but array of characters ended with null character (‘\0’).
This null character indicates the end of the string.

Strings are always enclosed by double quotes. Whereas, character is

enclosed by single quotes in C.

 Example :- char name[10];

In this example the variable name can store up to 10 bytes.
The following special symbols are used in C having some special meaning
and thus, cannot be used for some other purpose.
[] () {} , ; : * … = #

Braces{}: These opening and ending curly braces marks the start and end of
a block of code containing more than one executable statement.

Parentheses(): These special symbols are used to indicate function calls and
function parameters.

Brackets[]: Opening and closing brackets are used as array element

reference. These indicate single and multidimensional subscripts.
The symbols which are used to perform logical and mathematical
operations in a C program are called C operators.

Operators used in C program are

 Arithmetic operators
 Assignment operators
 Relational operators
 Logical operators
 Bit wise operators
 Conditional operators (ternary operators)
 Increment/decrement operators
 Special Operators