As jettero says, you must use ord if you want Perl to output an ASCII value. The C idiom you are using doesn't make sense in Perl. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

print ord('c'), "\n";

[download]
The 'c' in your C snippet looks just like the 'c' in your Perl snippet, but they're not the same. In C, as you already know, 'c' is a char, a character constant which can be readily exchanged for its corresponding ASCII value. In Perl, 'c' is a scalar value that is also referred to as a string literal. There is no such thing as a char in Perl, though a string literal can certainly contain only one character. I encourage you to read (and refer back to) perldata. With that out of the way, why did your program spit out a warning and convert your string literal 'c' to 0? Grandfather said that it was because Perl "numified" 'c', and that this is Perl slang which means 'what happens when a scalar is used in is a numeric context'. The following snippet may shed a bit more light, try running it. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

printf "%d\n", '1234';  # The entire string is an integer
printf "%d\n", '12c3';  # printf stops the format conversion at the fi
+rst non-integer  
printf "%d\n", 'c123';  # No characters converted, 0 is returned
printf "%d\n", '0c123'; # Conversion stops after first character, 0 is
+ returned

[download]

In reply to Re: Getting the ascii number through perl's printf by virtualsue
in thread Getting the ascii number through perl's printf by jesuashok

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.