2 Ways to Return the ASCII Code for a Given Character in MariaDB

MariaDB includes two built-in functions that allow us to get the ASCII code from a given character.

These functions are:

Both of these functions do the same thing, except that ORD() can handle multi-byte characters (whereas ASCII() can’t).

Below are examples of each function.

The `ASCII()` Function

The ASCII() function returns the numeric ASCII value of the leftmost character of its string argument.

Example:

SELECT ASCII('Oceans');

Result:

+-----------------+
| ASCII('Oceans') |
+-----------------+
|              79 |
+-----------------+

Bear in mind that only the leftmost character’s ASCII code is returned. Therefore, doing the following produces the same result:

SELECT ASCII('O');

Result:

+------------+
| ASCII('O') |
+------------+
|         79 |
+------------+

The ORD() function works the same way, except that it can handle multi-byte characters.

Here’s the same example from above, but using ORD() instead of ASCII():

SELECT ORD('Oceans');

Result:

+---------------+
| ORD('Oceans') |
+---------------+
|            79 |
+---------------+

And here it is on a multi-byte character:

SELECT ORD('©');

Result:

+-----------+
| ORD('©')  |
+-----------+
|     49833 |
+-----------+