C Program to check given character is vowel or consonant

🧑‍💻 By quescol • 📝 Updated on: 08 May 2025

In this tutorial we are going to learn writing program in C to check a given character is vowel or consonant. To write the complete program we will use if else statement to check input character is equal to vowel or consonant.

Before start writing C Program, lets understand about vowel and consonant.

What is Vowel and Consonant?

In English alphabets a, e, i, o, u characters are known as alphabets. And Rest of the characters are known as Consonant.

Vowel : a, e, i, o, u

Consonant : b, c, d

How our vowel and consonant program will work?

• Our program will take one character as an input.
• If character will match with Vowels like any of a, b, c, d, e, then print character is vowel.
• And in the rest case it will print consonant.
• Here is one edge case like if someone has inserted any special characters, then our program will print neither vowel nor consonant.

C Program to Check a given character is Vowel or Consonant

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
  char ch;
  printf("C program to check given character is vowel or consonant \n");
  printf("Please enter a character\n");
  scanf("%c", &ch);
  if ((ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z') || (ch >= 'A' &&ch <= 'Z')) {
    if (ch=='a' || ch=='A' || ch=='e' || ch=='E' || ch=='i' || ch=='I' 
         || ch=='o' || ch=='O' || ch== 'u' || ch=='U')
      printf("Given Character %c is a vowel.\n", ch);
    else
      printf("Given Character %c is a consonant.\n", ch);
  }
  else
    printf("Given Character %c is neither a vowel nor a consonant.\n", ch);
  return 0;
}

Output 1:

C program to check given character is vowel or consonant 
Please enter a character
t
Given Character t is a consonant.

C Program to check vowel and consonant using isAlpha() method

isAlpha() method is available in ctype.h header file to check whether a given character is alphabets or not. It will help to check if there is some special character given in input, print given character is neither vowel nor consonant.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
int main() {
   char ch;
   printf("=== C program to check given character is vowel or consonant === \n");
   printf("Please enter a character: ");
   scanf("%c", &ch);
   if (!isalpha(ch))
      printf("Given Character %c is neither a vowel nor a consonant.\n", ch);
   else if ((ch=='a' || ch=='A' || ch=='e' || ch=='E' || ch=='i' || ch=='I' 
             || ch=='o' || ch=='O' || ch== 'u' || ch=='U'))
      printf("Given Character %c is a vowel.", ch);
   else
      printf("Given Character %c is a consonant.", ch);
   return 0;
}

Output

=== C program to check given character is vowel or consonant === 
Please enter a character: g
Given Character g is a consonant.