Since unsigned char represents 0 - 255 and the extended ascii code for 'à' is 133, I expected the following C code to print 133
unsigned char uc;
uc='à';
printf("%hhu \n",uc);
Instead, both clang and gcc produce the following error
error: character too large for enclosing character literal type
uc='à';
^
What went wrong?
By the way I copied à from a French language website and pasted the result into the assignment statement. What I suspect is the way I created à may not be valid.
Since unsigned char represents 0 - 255
This is true in most implementations, but the C standard does not require that a char is limited to 8 bit, it can be larger and support a larger range.
and the extended ascii code for 'à' is 133,
There can be a C implementation where 'à' has the value 133 (0x85) but since most implementations use Unicode, 'à' probably uses the code point 224 (0xE0) which is most likely stored as UTF-8. Your Editor is also set to UTF-8 and therefore needs more than a single byte to represent characters outside of ASCII. In UTF-8, all ASCII characters are stored like they are in ASCII and need 1 byte, all other characters are a combination of 2-4 byte and bit 7 is set in every one of them. I suggest you learn how UTF-8 works, UTF-8 is the best way to store text most of the time, so you should only use something else when you have a good reason to do so.
I expected the following C code to print 133
In UTF-8 the code point for à is stored as 0xC3 0xA0 which is combined to the value 0xE0. You can't store 0xC3 0xA0 in a 8 bit char. So clang reports an error.
You could try to store it in a int, unsigned, wchar_t or some other integer type that is large enough. GCC would store the value 0xC3A0 and not 0xE0, because that is the value inside the ''. However, C supports wide characters. The type wchar_t which may support more characters is most likely wchar_t is 32 or 16 on your system. To write a wide character literal, you can use the prefix L. With a wide character literal, the compiler would store the correct value of 0xE0.
Change the code to:
#include <wchar.h>
....
wchar_t wc;
wc=L'à';
printf("%u \n",(unsigned)wc);
char, be it signed or unsigned.