ord

ord ( string $string ) : int
Interprets the binary value of the first byte of string as an unsigned integer between 0 and 255.

If the string is in a single-byte encoding, such as ASCII, ISO-8859, or Windows 1252, this is equivalent to returning the position of a character in the character set’s mapping table. However, note that this function is not aware of any string encoding, and in particular will never identify a Unicode code point in a multi-byte encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

This function complements chr().