Casting non-numeric char to int?
c#
Solution
Everyone else (so far) has referred to ASCII. That's a very limited view - it works for `'a'`, but doesn't work for anything with an accent etc - which can very easily be represented by `char`.
A `char` is just an unsigned 16-bit integer, which is a UTF-16 code unit. Usually that's equivalent to a Unicode character, but not always - sometimes multiple code units are required for a single full character. See the documentation for `System.Char` for more details.
The implicit conversion from `char` to `int` (you don't need the cast in your code) just converts that 16-bit unsigned integer to a 32-bit signed integer in the natural, non-lossy way - just as if you had a `ushort`.
Note that every valid character in ASCII has the same value in UTF-16, which is why the two are often confused when the examples are only ones from the ASCII set.
Problem
I came across this line of code today: `int c = (int)'c';` I was not aware you could cast a `char` to an `int`. So I tested it out, and found that a=97, b=98, c=99, d=100 etc etc... Why is 'a' 97? What do those numbers relate to?