Character <-> ASCII Conversion

Convert characters to their numeric character codes and vice versa.

Usage

charToAscii(x, output = c("vector", "list"))

asciiToChar(i)

Arguments

x

a character vector.

output

character string specifying the output representation. One of "vector" (simplify the result whenever possible, the default) or "list" (always return a list). See Details.

i

an integer vector of character codes (1–255).

Value

• charToAscii() returns either an integer vector or a list of integer vectors, depending on output.

• asciiToChar() returns a character vector.

Details

charToAscii() converts each character in a string to its corresponding numeric code.

asciiToChar() converts numeric codes back to characters.

Only values in the range 1:127 belong to the ASCII standard and therefore have the same meaning across all systems. Values 128:255 depend on the current character encoding (for example ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252) and may produce different characters on different platforms.

Note that 0 (NUL) cannot be represented in R character strings and is therefore not supported.

The output argument controls the representation returned by charToAscii():

"vector"

Simplifies the result whenever possible.

Returns an integer vector if:

• the input consists of a single string, or

• all input strings have length one.

Otherwise, a list of integer vectors is returned.

"list"

Always returns a list of integer vectors.

See also

charToRaw(), rawToChar()

Other string.transform: mGsub(), strSplitToCol(), strSplitToDummy()

Examples

# basic usage
x <- charToAscii("Silvia")
x
#> [1]  83 105 108 118 105  97

asciiToChar(x)
#> [1] "S" "i" "l" "v" "i" "a"

# multiple strings
charToAscii(c("A", "BC"), output = "list")
#> [[1]]
#> [1] 65
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] 66 67
#> 

# split into individual characters
strsplit(asciiToChar(x), split = NULL)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "S"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "i"
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "l"
#> 
#> [[4]]
#> [1] "v"
#> 
#> [[5]]
#> [1] "i"
#> 
#> [[6]]
#> [1] "a"
#> 

# comparison with raw representation
charToRaw("Silvia")
#> [1] 53 69 6c 76 69 61