How to print ASCII value of a character using basic awk only

Question

I need to print the ASCII value of the given character in awk only.

Below code gives 0 as output:

echo a | awk \'{ printf(\"%d \\n\",$1)         


        

Answer 1

It seems this is not a trivial problem. I found this approach using a lookup array, which should work for A-Z at least:

 BEGIN { convert="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" } 
       { num=index(convert,substr($0,2,1))+64; print num }