Re: Converting integers to char's

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usen et.coe.montana.edu!milton!mfeldman@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Michael Feldman)]

In article <9426@gara.une.oz.au> cfiddyme@gara.une.oz.au (Kith Kanan) writes:
>
>   Is there any easy way to convert an integer variable to a character.
>   I am new to ada and would like to do this without a case statement.
>                        thanks Chris.
>
I assume that what you're looking for is an Ada equivalent to Pascal's
CHR function, or Basic's CHR$ function, to which you pass a nonnegative
integer (presumably in the range 0..127) and get back the corresponding
ASCII character.

Yes, there's an easy way. It's called the Val attribute. Given some
integer X and a character variable Ch,
   Ch := Character'Val(X);
will do the trick, raising Constraint_Error if X's value is out of the
ASCII range.

By the way, going the other way is equally easy.
   X := Character'Pos(Ch);
stores in X the position of Ch in the type Character, which in effect
gets you the ASCII value.

Pos, Val, and lots of other attributes are defined uniformly for
discrete types (integers, enumerations).

Attributes are neat in Ada (though I think they could be neater if they
were more complete and uniform). Check your Ada book or the LRM on this.

Mike

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Michael B. Feldman
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University of Washington FR-35           The George Washington University
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