Am I giving the Arduino too much data?

When I get input from Serial.read(), it's the ASCII value for whatever key was hit. Is there a way to get the "plain text" character input? Like, instead of getting '97' when I hit 'a', can I just get 'a'?
Thanks.

New question: I wrote a program that's supposed to get some input from Serial.read(), and then play the morse code for the text through a speaker. I have an array for each letter of the alphabet that has numerical representations for dots or dashes. But when I ran the program, nothing happened. I put an LED in and tried having it blink at the beginning of the loop() method, and nothing happened. But when I commented everything out so only the code for the LED was left it worked. Right now I'm uncommenting the arrays one at a time and then sending, and the LED keeps blinking. What's going on?

e: Also, when I print one of the letter arrays, it just prints out zeros instead of what's actually in the array. For example, if I declare and initialize o as 'int o[] = {2, 2, 2};' and then print that, it prints out three zeros. I just print them in a for loop with Serial.println(), anybody know what's happening?

Thanks.

I'm not sure what you're asking. Setting:

char character = 'a';

is the exact same thing as setting

char character = 97;

When you hit 'a', you do get an 'a'...

• Ben

Oh... oops. That was stupid of me.

Thanks.

That was stupid of me.

Nah, not at all--there's a difference between not understanding something and being stupid. No need to be so quick to put yourself down.

Or, as I read once somewhere: "you gotta be pretty smart before you can even start being this stupid."

--Phil.

I know, but I did understand =/

Thanks, new question ;D

Nevermind, I got it. I think it was running out of RAM.