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Character <-> ASCII Conversion

Source: R/char-ascii-conversion.R
char-ascii-conversion.Rd

Convert characters to their numeric character codes and vice versa.

Usage

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

asciiToChar(x)

Arguments

x

for charToAscii() a character vector, for asciiToChar() an integer vector of character codes (1–255).

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.

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