In MySQL, you can use the ASCII() function to return the ASCII code for a given character. More specifically, it returns the ASCII code for the leftmost character in a given string.

You can also use ORD(), which works the same way, except that it also supports multibyte characters.

Syntax

Here’s the syntax for the ASCII() function:

ASCII(str)

Where str is the string that you want the ASCII code of the leftmost character from.

Example

Here’s an example:

SELECT ASCII('Z');

Result:

+------------+
| ASCII('Z') |
+------------+
|         90 |
+------------+

So we can see from this example that the uppercase letter Z has an ASCII code of 90.

Note that there’s a different ASCII code for uppercase letters vs lowercase. So to get the ASCII code for the lowercase z, we’d need to provide the lowercase z as the argument:

SELECT ASCII('z');

Result:

+------------+
| ASCII('z') |
+------------+
|        122 |
+------------+

And as mentioned, only the leftmost character is returned:

SELECT ASCII('Zz');

Result:

+-------------+
| ASCII('Zz') |
+-------------+
|          90 |
+-------------+

An Alternative: The ORD() Function

You can also use the ORD() function to return the ASCII value of a character.

SELECT ORD('Z');

Result:

+----------+
| ORD('Z') |
+----------+
|       90 |
+----------+

The difference between ASCII() and ORD() is that, ORD() can also return values for multibyte characters whereas ASCII() is limited to just the ASCII range.