>>-ASCII--(--expression--)-------------------------------------><
The schema is SYSFUN.
Returns the ASCII code value of the leftmost character of the argument as an integer.
The argument can be of any built-in character string type. For a VARCHAR the maximum length is 4 000 bytes and for a CLOB the maximum length is 1 048 576 bytes. LONG VARCHAR is converted to CLOB for processing by the function.
The result of the function is always INTEGER.
The result can be null; if the argument is null, the result is the null value.