Typecasting from char* to void*

#1

Hi all,
I’m learning address of operator ‘&’ lecture and I have a question that why we can’t directly retrieve the address of a char variable.

For example, the code in the lecture:

char ch = 'A';
cout << &ch << endl;   // Result is 'A'

// Explicit typecasting from char* to void*
cout << (void*)&ch << endl;   // Result is the address of ch variable

What exactly operator<< function did? And why we have to explicit typecasting it from char* to void* (or int*), what does void* mean in this case?

Thank you so much for your help

#2

When you are taking the address of ch, you get char *. operator<< interprets that as a C string, and tries to print a character sequence instead of its address.
because in c, string treated as a character sequence and when you tries to print the value of string the address of first character is passed.
so in this case , the value stored in ch is printed