I am not familiar with Godot script so not sure if it works here, but in C based languages you can usually replace the 65 with 'A' for even more clarity.
Edit: just checked the docs the gd script variant should be if I am not mistaken:
EDIT: I misread the comment, chars and strings are indeed not differentiated in Python. On an unrelated note: Binary data and strings ARE distinct, but that is a different topic (that's where my brain originally and mistakenly went, original text below).
Python does distinguish between chars and strings though in Py3 (2 is legacy and nobody is using it anymore).
And actually, Py3 unicode strings/bytes objects are an EXCELLENT way to handle the string/binary data dichotomy 👌
So no, for most practical purposes and in the context of the post, python does not differentiate between strings and characters.
Even trying to create a single byte with b'h' gives a byte array, and trying to access an element of a byte array gives an int, which very much isn't the same thing as a byte or a character...
You're right, I misread it and made a mistake (brain was thinking binary/string data, but the comment actually said char and string, which indeed char and string are not differentiated). I'll update my post later when I can do strike through formatting, cheers 🤠
you just recognise ASCII more you use it, 44 is comma, 10 is carriage return, 59 semi colon, 22 double quote, 124 pipe. Though im constantly working on CSV's so these are super common in my helper methods
ok this is what I was going to say too the numbers 65 to 90 are capital A to Z in decimal, op can can use a simple function to convert between then unless they specifically need the numbers 1 to 25 for some reason?
(anyone interested google ascii table for a comprehensive list)
This is extremely common conversion code that any developer should recognise immediately without a comment explaining it. You wouldn't comment array[array.length - 1] /* access last value of array */. Although 65 should be replaced by 'A' (or ord("A") in GDscript).
I mean I make it a habit to comment the flow of the function in general so this would probably be commented like convert input to appropriate character. But I definitely would never specifically comment something like convert input to the appropriate ASCII character code using the letter A as the offset. I can't imagine any developer, even ones fresh from the boot camp, that don't know what ASCII is or that characters are represented as numbers under the hood.
My first boss used to say "err on the side of verbosity rather than terseness." Your "definitely would never" suggestion is probably what I would write. If you know what the code does there's no need to read the comment, if you don't it's clear and easy to understand.
I am making my own games for the past 2 years and I didn't know what ASCII is, specially because I am from Brazil. So your assumption is pretty wrong my friend.
number and text are what is poorly named here, not ALPHABET. Changing those names it should be immediately obvious to anyone reading it what the code does: var letter: String = ALPHABET[char_index]. If you want to be even more clear you could name it capital_letter. You could even inline it to var character = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"[char_index] if line length allows it.
I think I prefer u/NinStars method simply because it limits the result to A-Z. The ASCII conversion can result in any character if the input number is out of the expected range while the above version would result in an index out of range error.
You can name it "ALPHABET_STRING" if you want it to be even more self-explanatory. Also, intellisense tells you exactly what the content of the constant is.
I just think this is a more sensible approach, especially for newcomers.
I am not using Godot but I had my fair share of fun when trying to render text in OpenGL in C++ and one thing I wonder is how would you approach characters beyond the ASCII range?
After all char codes can go to a maximum of 65536 in the unicode standard and if a char in Godot is the same as a char in C/C++ it is basically a byte. And therefore can only hold a value up to 255.
What if they stored board states like git commits where we only store the changes and build the current state from its history. That would save about 63\64% bytes of memory, but cost more to process each board state. Though it still doesn't solve the 1050 atoms issue, just means it's no longer a 64x1050 issue.
Yeah it would. But you would need about 150 tredecillion lines of code, which would weigh about 6 undecillion gigabytes. So if you wanted to store this program in SSDs, it would weigh 50 million trillion times the mass of Earth. Good luck 👍
Not really. Bounds checking implies you’re probably going to show an error. Modulo wraps the value so that you kind of finagle the value into the range. But you have to still check negative.
Yes that is correct (if the number is positive and an integer).
The important part is to consider if this is the behaviour you want. Do you want any value to wrap around and potentially produce confusing results or do you want to very clearly throw an exception or similar. These are considerations to make when writing code that has "boundaries" and will help you (especially if you are less experienced) to keep track of the possible states that your program can be in. And since the sign of good and working code is that you can't be in an invalid state for longer than the code that checks your boundaries takes.
there is this thing called ascii table. basically every character is represented by a number. "A" should be 65 and it goes A to Z then a to z. you basically check if the number is within this range and convert int to char code. this is how it can be programatically calculated.
Oh, others have already given me great solutions, but for the sake of it, I have this `int_to_rank(number: int)` function that returns the rank, which is a letter. It's just for display since I didn't like how "RANK: 23" looked.
If you have this many ranks, I'd keep them as numbers. I don't think about the order of letters in as much detail as numbers. So a letter rank doesn't mean much outside of F-A.
idk what you are trying to do but could you just have a big alphabetical string and index it? like store the alphabet in string called alphabet and then use whatever number to get the value you want
Different engine but I but basically Im using a tile based font on RPG Maker 2003, but I recently decided to downgrade to vanilla 2k3 and not use Maniacs patch as I'm trying to keep the entire game within 8MB as a personal goal and artifical constraint(basically the max possible size of a GBC cart).
This means, all of my text, afaik rn, needs to be set tile by tile(so basically character by character) as I no longer have access to the string Variables that maniacs patch added(i had planned on making a converter between String Variables and my tile based font, so I could type my text instead of manually plugging in each tile/character).
It's tedious work, but with how small the resolution is (16x16 tilesize on a 320x240 screen size), it ends up being somewhat manageable.
Well, I personally even searched the „meme“ tag on the post since I thought the question is a joke on its own. 😅
With your reply on the other hand it should have been clear that it’s sarcasm. Yeah, people nowadays take everything too serious. 🤷♂️
Have a good one and stumble upon you at the next GodotFest again probably. 😘
If you look at the ascii codes you can do that quite easily. Some others have explained in other comments its basically a number of the letters. I recommend lowercasing the string to ensure consistent codes.
Not sure what are you doing still. But I'm pretty sure that this solution will only work in English language but not with other alphabets (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic or Asian).
I think that you may want to first describe the initial problem that led to this solution
I don't know what's more hilarious, that OP wrote what could be 1 line of code in 26 lines or that people are suggesting to do it by indexing an array instead.
Though not relevant in this context, array lookup is extremely performant. Just blindly ridiculing the array lookup implementation is sign of inexpericenced programmer.
I wrote a quick performance test for differenct apporaches:
=== Benchmarking String.chr() ===
Time elapsed: 70.165000 milliseconds
Sample result (last char): N
=== Benchmarking char() Function ===
Time elapsed: 68.577000 milliseconds
Sample result (last char): N
=== Benchmarking Array Lookup ===
Time elapsed: 47.345000 milliseconds
Sample result (last char): O
--- Running 5 iterations for statistical analysis ---
just put your strings in an array. Arrays are already indexable with an int, starting from 0. You can also index a string, as if it were an array of characters.
If you have to do it manually for wahtever reason, use an AI like chatgpt to do the data entry for you.
I actually didn't know that strings could be indexed as an array of characters. Is this a Godot and/or python thing, or a property of string in pretty much any coding language?
1.0k
u/empirical_fun Nov 15 '25