Inverse 'ascii' function

Posted in 1994

Edwin Babadaglian — 30 Nov 1994 02:37:56 -0500 — source: Informix-list mailing list archive (1991-1998)

I was reviewing TOOLREL_6.0 to find bug number 21362 ("MISSING INVERSE FUNCTION OF ASCII") being 'fixed' by the new ORD(string-expr) function. I flashed back to a conversation I had a few years ago with a colleague about his solution which involved a SELECT from the 'ascii' table, after which he agreed that there must be a better way. My speculation was that Informix did not provide such a function because it was not necessary for them to do so, which scored some points with me. Instead of the terribly inefficient 'SELECT' approach, my solution uses the 'ascii' function in the context of a binary search with less than 20 lines of code and no disk access. I must admit some disappointment to the absence of an inverse 'ascii' function being considered a bug, since I gave Informix credit for it. It's still not a bug in my book! Thanks for listening. Edwin Babadaglian edwinb@panix.com