# text2ascii proc

Source: https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/text2ascii

### Format
> `text2ascii(T,pos=1)`

### Args
- `T`: A text string.
- `pos`: The byte position in T to use, starting at 1.


### Returns
> A number representing the character's ASCII or Unicode code.

ASCII codes are numerical values corresponding to keyboard and special characters. Among other things, they are used to represent many symbols in HTML. This proc converts a text string to its corresponding ascii representation.

```dm /text2ascii/
world << text2ascii("A")  // = 65
world << text2ascii("HAPPY",2)  // = 65
```

With [Unicode](https://ref.dm-lang.org/notes/Unicode.md), things may get more complicated. DM stores text with UTF-8 encoding, so at this position there might be several bytes strung together to make a single character. The value of `pos` is in bytes, not characters. When the return value is 128 (0x80) or higher, multiple bytes are used for the charcter. In that case the next character position is not `pos + 1` like it is for regular text, but you can use `pos + length(ascii2text(result))` instead. Or, you can determine the byte count from this table:

|  Character code  |Size in bytes|
|------------------|-------------|
|     0 - 0x7F     |      1      |
|   0x80 - 0x7FF   |      2      |
|  0x800 - 0xFFFF  |      3      |
|0x10000 - 0x10FFFF|      4      |

Alternatively, you can use `test2ascii_char()` to work with character positions instead of bytes, at a performance cost.

### See also
- [ascii2text proc](https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/ascii2text.md)
- [entities (text)](https://ref.dm-lang.org/DM/text/entities.md)
- [Unicode](https://ref.dm-lang.org/notes/Unicode.md)