ASCII and CHAR functions

	Transact-SQL string and datetime functions String functions in MS SQL SERVER ASCII and CHAR functions
	Let's start from two reciprocally related functions - ASCII and CHAR. The ASCII function returns an ASCII code value of the leftmost character of a character expression, being a function argument. Here is an example of the way to determine how many different letters which the names of the ships in the Ships table start from are: Console Execute SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ASCII(name)) FROM Ships SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ASCII(name)) FROM Ships Scheme The result is 11. To find out what these letters are, we can use CHAR function that returns a character by a known ASCII code value (from 0 to 255): Console Execute SELECT DISTINCT CHAR(ASCII(name)) FROM Ships ORDER BY 1 SELECT DISTINCT CHAR(ASCII(name)) FROM Ships ORDER BY 1 Scheme We should note that the identical result can be got simpler using one more function - LEFT. string functions ASCII CHAR

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