ASCII (Transact-SQL)

**APPLIES TO:** SQL Server (starting with 2008) Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Data Warehouse Parallel Data Warehouse

Returns the ASCII code value of the leftmost character of a character expression.

Transact-SQL Syntax Conventions

Syntax

ASCII ( character_expression )  

Arguments

character_expression
An expression of type char or varchar.

Return types

int

Remarks

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It serves as a character encoding standard for modern computers. See the Printable characters section of ASCII for a list of ASCII characters.

Examples

This example assumes an ASCII character set, and returns the ASCII value for 6 characters.

SELECT ASCII('A') AS A, ASCII('B') AS B,   
ASCII('a') AS a, ASCII('b') AS b,  
ASCII(1) AS [1], ASCII(2) AS [2];  

Here is the result set.

A           B           a           b           1           2  
----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------  
65          66          97          98          49          50  

See also

CHAR (Transact-SQL)
NCHAR (Transact-SQL)
UNICODE (Transact-SQL)
String Functions (Transact-SQL)