ascii-transact-sql.md

title	ASCII (Transact-SQL) | Microsoft Docs
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ms.date	07/24/2017
ms.prod	sql-non-specified
ms.prod_service	database-engine, sql-database, sql-data-warehouse, pdw
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f1_keywords	ASCII_TSQL ASCII
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helpviewer_keywords	ASCII function characters [SQL Server], ASCII code [SQL Server], ASCII leftmost character of expression
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ASCII (Transact-SQL)

[!INCLUDEtsql-appliesto-ss2008-all-md]

Returns the ASCII code value of the leftmost character of a character expression.

Transact-SQL Syntax Conventions

Syntax

ASCII ( character_expression )  

Arguments

character_expression
An expression of type char or varchar.

Return types

int

Remarks

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It serves as a character encoding standard for modern computers. See the Printable characters section of ASCII for a list of ASCII characters.

Examples

This example assumes an ASCII character set, and returns the ASCII value for 6 characters.

SELECT ASCII('A') AS A, ASCII('B') AS B,   
ASCII('a') AS a, ASCII('b') AS b,  
ASCII(1) AS [1], ASCII(2) AS [2];  

[!INCLUDEssResult]

A           B           a           b           1           2  
----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------  
65          66          97          98          49          50  

See also

CHAR (Transact-SQL)
NCHAR (Transact-SQL)
UNICODE (Transact-SQL)
String Functions (Transact-SQL)