Constants

 Constants are expressions with a fixed value.

3.14159    // 3.14159
6.02e23    // 6.02 x 10^23
1.6e-19    // 1.6 x 10^-19
3.0        // 3.0 
 

3.14159L   // long double
6.02e23f   // float

'z'
'p'
"Hello world"
"How do you do?" 

The first two expressions represent single character constants, and the following two represent string literals composed of several characters. Notice that to represent a single character we enclose it between single quotes (‘) and to express a string (which generally consists of more than one character) we enclose it between double quotes (“).

When writing both single character and string literals, it is necessary to put the quotation marks surrounding them to distinguish them from possible variable identifiers or reserved keywords. Notice the difference between these two expressions:

x
'x'

x alone would refer to a variable whose identifier is x, whereas ‘x’ (enclosed within single quotation marks) would refer to the character constant ‘x’.

Character and string literals have certain peculiarities, like the escape codes. These are special characters that are difficult or impossible to express otherwise in the source code of a program, like newline (n) or tab (t). All of them are preceded by a backslash (). Here you have a list of some of such escape codes:

For example:

'n'
't'
"Left t Right"
"onentwonthree" 

Additionally, you can express any character by its numerical ASCII code by writing a backslash character () followed by the ASCII code expressed as an octal (base-8) or hexadecimal (base-16) number. In the first case (octal) the digits must immediately follow the backslash (for example 23 or 40), in the second case (hexadecimal), an x character must be written before the digits themselves (for example x20 or x4A).

String literals can extend to more than a single line of code by putting a backslash sign () at the end of each unfinished line.

"string expressed in 
two lines" 

You can also concatenate several string constants separating them by one or several blank spaces, tabulators, newline or any other valid blank character:

"this forms" "a single" "string" "of characters"

Finally, if we want the string literal to be explicitly made of wide characters (wchar_t type), instead of narrow characters (char type), we can precede the constant with the L prefix:

L"This is a wide character string" 

Wide characters are used mainly to represent non-English or exotic character sets.

Boolean literals

There are only two valid Boolean values: true and false. These can be expressed in C++ as values of type bool by using the Boolean literals true and false.

Defined constants (#define)

You can define your own names for constants that you use very often without having to resort to memory-consuming variables, simply by using the #define preprocessor directive. Its format is:

#define PI 3.14159
#define NEWLINE 'n' 

This defines two new constants: PI and NEWLINE. Once they are defined, you can use them in the rest of the code as if they were any other regular constant, for example:

// defined constants: calculate circumference

#include 
using namespace std;

#define PI 3.14159
#define NEWLINE 'n'

int main ()
{
  double r=5.0;               // radius
  double circle;

  circle = 2 * PI * r;
  cout << circle;
  cout << NEWLINE;

  return 0;
}

In fact the only thing that the compiler preprocessor does when it encounters #define directives is to literally replace any occurrence of their identifier (in the previous example, these were PI and NEWLINE) by the code to which they have been defined (3.14159 and 'n' respectively).

The #define directive is not a C++ statement but a directive for the preprocessor; therefore it assumes the entire line as the directive and does not require a semicolon (;) at its end. If you append a semicolon character (;) at the end, it will also be appended in all occurrences of the identifier within the body of the program that the preprocessor replaces.

Declared constants (const)

With the const prefix you can declare constants with a specific type in the same way as you would do with a variable: 

const int pathwidth = 100;
const char tabulator = 't';

Here, pathwidth and tabulator are two typed constants. They are treated just like regular variables except that their values cannot be modified after their definition.