ASCII value of character in Ruby

Question

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".

Solution 1

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 

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

x.ord

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M001177

Comments

[Jonas Elfström]

It also seems that .ord needs correct UTF-8 but that .sum does not care.

[jasonleonhard]

0.ord will work, returning 0, the ascii value. However, 0.sum will not, it returns undefined method for Fixnum.

[Cristik]

This doesn't give correct results for Unicode characters: "€".ord => 8364, while "€".sum => 528