What are you trying to do?

Max doesn't have a specific datatype 'char'.

C-style chars are simply integers in the range 0-255; in some programming languages possibly represented as single ASCII chars but in reality no different from other integers (aside from range restrictions). These are typically treated in Max as integers.

In Max you can also have single-character symbols, which are simply ordinary symbols.

Depending on what you're trying to do, one or the other representation may be what you're after.