title: How to convert a character to an integer in Swift 3
body: <p>I am trying to simply convert a character or string to an integer in Swift 3. I am a long time C++ developer who is just learning Swift and finding it extremely frustrating to do some of the simplest things in Swift 3 (ie, indexing into a string, converting a character to an int).</p>
  
  <p>Can someone please help me convert characters to ints, specifically in Swift 3 Xcode 8?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you!</p>