Swift String to CChar

You can convert a Swift string to a Cstring and then just grab the first (and only) character:

var charString = "a"
var ccharOptional = charString.cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)?[0]  // CChar?
var cchar = (charString.cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)?[0])!       // CChar