C Operators Priority and Associativity - C Operators Precedence

C Operator Precedence Table

This page lists C operators in order of precedence (highest to lowest). Their associativity indicates in what order operators of equal precedence in an expression are applied.

Operator	Description	Associativity
( ) [ ] . -> ++ --	Parentheses (function call) (see Note 1) Brackets (array subscript) Member selection via object name Member selection via pointer Postfix increment/decrement (see Note 2)	left-to-right
++ -- + - ! ~ (type) * & sizeof	Prefix increment/decrement Unary plus/minus Logical negation/bitwise complement Cast (convert value to temporary value of type) Dereference Address (of operand) Determine size in bytes on this implementation	right-to-left
*  /  %	Multiplication/division/modulus	left-to-right
+  -	Addition/subtraction	left-to-right
<<  >>	Bitwise shift left, Bitwise shift right	left-to-right
<  <= >  >=	Relational less than/less than or equal to Relational greater than/greater than or equal to	left-to-right
==  !=	Relational is equal to/is not equal to	left-to-right
&	Bitwise AND	left-to-right
^	Bitwise exclusive OR	left-to-right
|	Bitwise inclusive OR	left-to-right
&&	Logical AND	left-to-right
| |	Logical OR	left-to-right
? :	Ternary conditional	right-to-left
= +=  -= *=  /= %=  &= ^=  |= <<=  >>=	Assignment Addition/subtraction assignment Multiplication/division assignment Modulus/bitwise AND assignment Bitwise exclusive/inclusive OR assignment Bitwise shift left/right assignment	right-to-left
,	Comma (separate expressions)	left-to-right
Note 1: Parentheses are also used to group sub-expressions to force a different precedence; such parenthetical expressions can be nested and are evaluated from inner to outer. Note 2: Postfix increment/decrement have high precedence, but the actual increment or decrement of the operand is delayed (to be accomplished sometime before the statement completes execution). So in the statement y = x * z++; the current value of z is used to evaluate the expression (i.e., z++ evaluates to z) and z only incremented after all else is done. See postinc.c for another example.