sum function usage for string

Hello all,

I was working on an entry-level question "Number of 1s in a binary string", my answer was converting the number to string and use strfind function '1'.

Saw a very clean answer , I don't quite understand this. If x is a string, what can we get x-'0'

y = sum(x-'0')

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Subtracting ASCII 0 from an ASCII string converts the string to numeric values.

There is some controversy as to that being ‘correct’, however it definitely does work! (It takes advantage of the fact that everything in a computer is stored as numeric representations.)

[Xuande Zhang]

Thanks!

I am still digesting this, it's kind of tricky to use this I think.

[Star Strider]

As always, my pleasure!

As I mentioned, it is a bit controversial.