How to convert a single character to its integer value in Python?

In Python, the ord() function converts a given character to the corresponding ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) integer. The ord() function raises a TypeError if you pass a string value as a parameter.

Converting a single alphabet to its integer

In the following example, we have converted a character 'A' into its Unicode using the ord() function -

my_str='A'
result=ord(my_str)
print("Unicode of 'A'-",result)

Following is an output of the above code -

Unicode of 'A'- 65

Printing Integer values of all the alphabets

We can use the ord() function to print all the Unicode characters of the alphabet by iterating through a for loop.

char_dict = {chr(ch): ord(chr(ch)) for ch in range(ord('A'), ord('Z') + 1)}
print(char_dict)

Following is an output of the above code -

{'A': 65, 'B': 66, 'C': 67, 'D': 68, 'E': 69, 'F': 70, 'G': 71, 'H': 72, 'I': 73, 'J': 74, 'K': 75, 'L': 76, 'M': 77, 'N': 78, 'O': 79, 'P': 80, 'Q': 81, 'R': 82, 'S': 83, 'T': 84, 'U': 85, 'V': 86, 'W': 87, 'X': 88, 'Y': 89, 'Z': 90}

Example

In the following example, we have passed a string value resulted in a TypeError.

my_str='St'
result=ord(my_str)
print(result)

Following is an output of the above code -

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/cg/root/89556/main.py", line 2, in <module>
    result=ord(my_str)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: ord() expected a character, but string of length 2 found