Python: convert str to int inside a recursive function

Question

I am learning about recursive functions and I have made a simple " string to ASCII " converter which returns the ASCII value of each character of a string.

Here is what I have made so far:

def cod(n):
    if n == "":
        return "" 
    else:
        a = str(ord(n[0])) + cod(n[1:])
        return a

This works fine like this:

=> cod('hello')
=> '104101108108111'

The problem is when I am trying to get an int as output instead of a string . I can't simply convert variable a because it's a recursive function, and it's not possible to iterate over an int.

After this point I am a little lost, can someone point out how to get an int as a final result of this recursive function?

Answer 1

def cod(n):
    if n == "":
        return "" 
    else:
        a = str(ord(n[0])) + str(cod(n[1:]))
        return int(a)

Answer 2

You might want to create another method for returning integer. Just to keep the code clean,

def cod(n):
    if n == "":
        return "" 
    else:
        a = str(ord(n[0])) + cod(n[1:])
        return a

def codI(n):
    return int(cod(n))


print type(codI("hello")) 
print type(cod("hello"))