How to get the Ascii Integer value of the first letter of a NSString in Objective-C?

Question

In Objective-C, how to get the Ascii Integer value of the first letter of a NSString?

Answer 1

if ([aString length] > 0) {
    unichar firstCharacter = [aString characterAtIndex: 0];
    // ...
}

That's all. unichar is an alias of unsigned short and so is an integer type. However, there is no guarantee the character is part of ASCII, as NSString is Unicode-based.