The point is not whether an applicant can or cannot do it, the point is that the question is deliberately rephrasing to obscure a candidates understanding. If you ask your average candidate to do that in laymans terms or they were given 5 seconds to google this would be a trivial task and you would have a different outcome. All this selects for is the candidate to have a working definition of an ascii decimal string in their head, it represents no ability to problem solve whatsoever.