How do I obtain the ASCII value of a character in Ruby 1.9?
I searched the Internet far and wide, but without success. I tried ?x and "x"[0], but all they return is "x".
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possible duplicate of [Getting an ascii character code in ruby - ? fails](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1270209/getting-an-ascii-character-code-in-ruby-fails) – Jörg W Mittag Mar 03 '11 at 12:06
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4"I searched the Internet far and wide, but without success.". Hmm. The [search engines](http://www.google.com/search?q=ruby+1.9+character+ordinal+value) must have had a bad day. – the Tin Man Mar 03 '11 at 15:47
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3@the Tin Man: Maybe the OP didn't know the word "ordinal". – Andrew Grimm Mar 03 '11 at 22:30
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1@Andrew Grimm - sigh... now I know my place in life. I find things for others. – the Tin Man Mar 04 '11 at 02:16
4 Answers
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The String#ord method will do the trick:
ruby-1.9.2-p136 > 'x'.ord
=> 120
ruby-1.9.2-p136 > '0'.ord
=> 48
ruby-1.9.2-p136 > ' '.ord
=> 32
Mark Rushakoff
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You can also use
ruby-2.0.0p353 > "x".sum
=> 120
ruby-2.0.0p353 > "a string".sum
=> 792
The 'sum' method will find the sum of all character codes, but if you put only one character it will give you the code of that one only.
Sh.K
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2It also seems that .ord needs correct UTF-8 but that .sum does not care. – Jonas Elfström May 03 '15 at 18:41
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0.ord will work, returning 0, the ascii value. However, 0.sum will not, it returns undefined method for Fixnum. – jasonleonhard Oct 26 '15 at 19:27
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1This doesn't give correct results for Unicode characters: `"€".ord => 8364`, while `"€".sum => 528` – Cristik Jun 19 '21 at 11:51
