There should be an easy way of declaring character codes.

[DartBot]

This issue was originally filed by @ahmetaa

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Currently defining a character code in Dart is not straight forward. An
example from http://www.dartlang.org/articles/io/ :

int semicolon = ';'.charCodeAt(0);

It is prety common to define or make comparisons with char codes in the code. Can there be an easier way of doing this in Dart?

[madsager]

Added Area-Language, Triaged labels.

[gbracha]

I think this is a library issue.

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Removed Area-Language label.
Added Area-Library label.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by @ahmetaa

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Perhaps overloading [] operator for String can help this?

int c = 'a'[0];

[lrhn]

The Library version is "x".codeUnitAt(0).
That's not going to be much easier. I think this is a language issue.

The alternative is to coopt some operator to give the same result as .codeUnitAt, e.g., "xy"(1) or "xy"/1. It's not going to be pretty. It can be made a compile-time constant, and may be defined to only work on single-character strings, so maybe even "x"() or ~"x" or -"x".

It needs spec work to guarantee that it's a compile-time constant, which we do need for switches and similar, so it might as well be done properly.

(The [] operator is already defined on string, and it returns a single code-unit string).

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Removed Type-Defect, Area-Library labels.
Added Type-Enhancement, Area-Language, Duplicate labels.
Marked as being merged into #4415.