Find the ASCII value of a character in C++

By Ankita Khan

In this tutorial, we will learn the process to find the ASCII value of a character in C++ programming.

The name ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding technique that we use for electronic communicating purposes as well as for representing text in computers. Each character or number has a unique ASCII value of its own, which ranges from 0 to 127.

Before proceeding to the solution, let us understand the problem first.

To understand this problem, let us consider a simple example.

For example, take a which has the ASCII value 97. This means that if we assign ‘a’ to a character variable, then the character variable holds the ASCII value rather than the character itself. To find the ASCII value of a given character in C++, we can use the int() function.

Program to find ASCII value of a character in C++

The program illustrates how to find the ASCII value of a character, number, special character as well as ASCII value range for ‘a’ to ‘z’, ‘A’ to ‘Z’ and ‘0’ to ‘9’ respectively. It uses the int() function, which accepts one parameter of a type character, and shows how to pass the argument in the form of a character or a character variable.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    char ch1='a';
    char ch2='5';
    char ch3='$';
    char ch4=' ';
    cout<<"ASCII value range of 'a' to 'z' is: "<<int('a')<<" - "<<int('z')<<endl; 
    cout<<"ASCII value range of 'A' to 'Z' is: "<<int('A')<<" - "<<int('Z')<<endl; 
    cout<<"ASCII value range of '0' to '9' is: "<<int('0')<<" - "<<int('9')<<endl;
    cout<<"ASCII value of 'a' is: "<<int(ch1)<<endl;
    cout<<"ASCII value of '5' is: "<<int(ch2)<<endl;
    cout<<"ASCII value of '$' is: "<<int(ch3)<<endl;
    cout<<"ASCII value of space is: "<<int(ch4)<<endl;
    return 0;
}

Output :

ASCII value range of 'a' to 'z' is: 97 - 122
ASCII value range of 'A' to 'Z' is: 65 - 90 
ASCII value range of 'a' to 'z' is: 48 - 57
ASCII value of 'a' is: 97
ASCII value of '5' is: 53
ASCII value of '$' is: 36
ASCII value of space is: 32

Thank you for reading. Keep learning!

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