How to get the ASCII value of a character

Question

How do I get the ASCII value of a character as an int in Python?

Answer 1

Note that ord() doesn't give you the ASCII value per se; it gives you the numeric value of the character in whatever encoding it's in. Therefore the result of ord('ä') can be 228 if you're using Latin-1, or it can raise a TypeError if you're using UTF-8. It can even return the Unicode codepoint instead if you pass it a unicode:

>>> ord(u'あ')
12354