Me neither, if it is supposed to be an abbreviation of "character", I would pronounce it as "care" (based on my SoCal accent, at least).
I call it "char" because that's how it's spelled, though.
I've always pronounced it "car". I've never made the connection with my northern English accent pronunciation of character i.e "caractah" - though the Mancunian glottal stop 'er' is hard to articulate :)
"19.26: How do you pronounce char?
Like the first word of char *. The accent is generally on the first syllable."
char as in c-har takes less effort for the mouth to sound out instead care.
Not if you're British :)
Home Counties accent (or even Received Pronunciation) do not pronounce "car" and the opening syllable of "character" the same way, since the 'a' in "car" is elongated (I'm not sure what the correct linguistic term for elongation is).