Converting the character into encoded ascii or unicode can be done with ord() and chr(). Ascii is very old computing standard, which gives every latin character a number in the computer.
The ascii table is shown below (you may note non english characters are missing, this is because at the time computing was mostly a US thing)
You can convert python text characters into ascii character values. In the conversion process, you can use the methods ord() and chr()
>>> print(ord('a'))
97
>>> print(chr(97))
a
>>>
>>> # reverse order
>>>
>>> print(str(ord('a')))
97
>>> print(chr(ord('a')))
a
>>>
>>>
You can also do this for strings:
>>> s = "hello" for item in s:
... print(ord(item))
104 101 108 108 111
>>>
>>>
In practice you'll likely not be using ascii tables so much, as Python is a high level programming language. This was very common during the early days of computing but now rarely is used. However, it's good to know about it.