reading a single chr from a string? : hello i am doing an exercise in C which takes a string like (a8$£de95") from the user and searches for letters (the smallest and largest) and then types the smallest and the largest letter and whatever letters in-between in this example it should show "abcde"  and after this it types 2 letters which are already in order in which case they are "de" .
now i wrote a basic program to help get an understanding of characters as i have not solved any char/sting exercise before (all the previous exercises where with numbers only) . i wrote 

    char y;
	printf("enter your string:- ");
	scanf("%s",&y);
	printf("%c",&y[2]);
	return 0;
but it shows me nothing so  my question is How do i read 1 character from a string and how do the computer knows what is the smallest and largest letter and how to i make him type the letters in between  ?
thanks