ord()
Use this function to get the ASCII value of a character. Non-ASCII characters will still give you a value here but probably not anything you’d want.
It only uses the first character in the sting passed in and will always return an integer.
$a = ord( 'a' ); // 97 $b = ord( 'A' ); // 65 $c = ord( 'apple' ); // 97 $b = ord( '' ); // 0
See the manual entry for ord()