ORD()

The ORD() operator returns the code point of a character in the current locale.

Syntax

ORD ( source STRING )

source is a string expression. The processing of the character byte sequence depends depends on the current application locale and length semantics.

Usage

The value returned by ORD() is the code point in the current locale of the character passed as argument, or the first byte of the encoded character.

The ORD() operator reads only the first character (or byte) of the source string passed as argument.

The ORD() operator returns NULL, if the first character (or byte) of the source string is not valid in the current encoding.

The processing of the character byte sequence depends on the application locale and the length semantics setting:

With a single byte encoding like ISO-8859-15 (and byte length semantics), ORD() returns the code point of the first SBCS byte / character, in the current charset.
With UTF-8 encoding and char length semantics, ORD() returns the UNICODE code point of the first character.
With UTF-8 encoding and byte length semantics, ORD() returns the value of the first byte of the first character.

If the character encoding is single byte, or when using UTF-8 and char length semantics, ORD() is the inverse of ASCII().

The next example shows the behavior of ORD(), depending on the character set and length semantics, on a Linux platform:

MAIN
    DEFINE src STRING
    DISPLAY "LC_ALL              : ", fgl_getenv("LC_ALL")
    DISPLAY "FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS: ", fgl_getenv("FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS")
    LET src = arg_val(1)
    DISPLAY "src                 : ",src
    DISPLAY "ORD(s)              : ",ORD(src)
END MAIN

ISO-8859-15 + BYTE length semantics (with terminal using ISO-8859-15 encoding):

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.iso8859-15"
$ export FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS="BYTE"
$ fglrun ord.42m "ôxx"
LC_ALL              : en_US.iso8859-15
FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS: BYTE
src                 : ôxx
ORD(s)              :         244        <-- ISO-8859-15 code point (0xF4) of ô

UTF-8 + CHAR length semantics (with terminal using UTF-8 encoding):

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.utf-8"
$ export FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS="CHAR"
$ fglrun ord.42m "愛xx"
LC_ALL              : en_US.utf-8
FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS: CHAR
src                 : 愛xx
ORD(s)              :       24859        <-- UNICODE code point of 愛

UTF-8 + BYTE length semantics (with terminal using UTF-8 encoding):

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.utf-8"
$ export FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS="BYTE"
$ fglrun ord.42m "愛xx"
LC_ALL              : en_US.utf-8
FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS: BYTE
src                 : 愛xx
ORD(s)              :         230        <-- first UTF-8 byte (0xE6) of 愛