Convert between characters and ASCII codes

asc(char, simplify = TRUE)

chr(ascii)

Arguments

char: vector of character strings
simplify: logical indicating whether to attempt to convert the result into a vector or matrix object. See sapply for details.
ascii: vector or list of vectors containing integer ASCII codes

Value

asc returns the integer ASCII values for each character in the elements of char. If simplify=FALSE the result will be a list containing one vector per element of char. If simplify=TRUE, the code will attempt to convert the result into a vector or matrix.

asc returns the characters corresponding to the provided ASCII values.

Functions

asc(): return the characters corresponding to the specified ASCII codes
chr(): return the ASCII codes for the specified characters.

Author

Adapted by Gregory R. Warnes greg@warnes.net from code posted by Mark Davis on the 'Data Debrief' blog on 2011-03-09 at https://datadebrief.blogspot.com/2011/03/ascii-code-table-in-r.html.

Examples


## ascii codes for lowercase letters
asc(letters)
#>   a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t 
#>  97  98  99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 
#>   u   v   w   x   y   z 
#> 117 118 119 120 121 122 

## uppercase letters from ascii codes
chr(65:90)
#>  [1] "A" "B" "C" "D" "E" "F" "G" "H" "I" "J" "K" "L" "M" "N" "O" "P" "Q" "R" "S"
#> [20] "T" "U" "V" "W" "X" "Y" "Z"

## works on muti-character strings
(tmp <- asc("hello!"))
#>      hello!
#> [1,]    104
#> [2,]    101
#> [3,]    108
#> [4,]    108
#> [5,]    111
#> [6,]     33
chr(tmp)
#> [1] "h" "e" "l" "l" "o" "!"

## Use 'simplify=FALSE' to return the result as a list
(tmp <- asc("hello!", simplify = FALSE))
#> $`hello!`
#> [1] 104 101 108 108 111  33
#> 
chr(tmp)
#>   hello! 
#> "hello!" 

## When simplify=FALSE the results can be...
asc(c("a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "y")) # a vector
#>   a   e   i   o   u   y 
#>  97 101 105 111 117 121 
asc(c("ae", "io", "uy")) # or a matrix
#>       ae  io  uy
#> [1,]  97 105 117
#> [2,] 101 111 121

## When simplify=TRUE the results are always a list...
asc(c("a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "y"), simplify = FALSE)
#> $a
#> [1] 97
#> 
#> $e
#> [1] 101
#> 
#> $i
#> [1] 105
#> 
#> $o
#> [1] 111
#> 
#> $u
#> [1] 117
#> 
#> $y
#> [1] 121
#> 
asc(c("ae", "io", "uy"), simplify = FALSE)
#> $ae
#> [1]  97 101
#> 
#> $io
#> [1] 105 111
#> 
#> $uy
#> [1] 117 121
#>