Question: I've searched around and I can't seem to find a way to represent arrow keys or the escape key as single char in c++. Is this even possible? I would expect that it would be similar to \t or \n for tab and new line respectively. Whenever I search for escaped characters, there's only ever a list of five or six well known characters.

Answer: 
Not possible; keyboards built for some languages have characters that can't be represented in a char, and anyway, how do you represent control-option-command-shift-F11 in a char?

Keyboards send scancodes, which are either some kind of event in a GUI system or a short string of bytes that represent the key. What codes depends on your system, but on most terminal-like systems, [ncurses](http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/) knows how to deal with them.
char variables usually represent elements in the ASCII table.  

<http://www.asciitable.com/>  

there is also man ascii on unix. If you want arrow keys you'll need a more direct way to access keyboard input. the arrow keys get translated into sequences of characters before hitting stdio. If oyu want direct keyboard access consider a GUI library, sdl, direct input to name a few.