How does one represent the empty char?

The empty space char would be ' '. If you're looking for null that would be '\0'.

You can't store "no character" in a character - it doesn't make sense.

As an alternative you could store a character that has a special meaning to you - e.g. null char '\0' - and treat this specially.

You can use c[i]= '\0' or simply c[i] = (char) 0.

The null/empty char is simply a value of zero, but can also be represented as a character with an escaped zero.