The Problem:
Using names.txt (right click and ‘Save Link/Target As…’), a 46K text file containing over five-thousand first names, begin by sorting it into alphabetical order. Then working out the alphabetical value for each name, multiply this value by its alphabetical position in the list to obtain a name score.
For example, when the list is sorted into alphabetical order, COLIN, which is worth 3 + 15 + 12 + 9 + 14 = 53, is the 938th name in the list. So, COLIN would obtain a score of 938 × 53 = 49714.
What is the total of all the name scores in the file?
The Solution:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | def getValue(name): counter = 0 for letter in name: counter = counter + (ord(letter)-64) return counter # Open the file and parse into a list without commas f = open("names.txt") names = f.readline() f.close() namesList = names.split(",") # Now dump into a list and strip those nasty aphostrophes nList = [] for names in namesList: names = names.strip('"') nList.append(names) nList.sort() totalSum = 0 counter = 0 for names in nList: counter = counter + 1 totalSum = totalSum + (getValue(names) * counter) print "The solution is ", totalSum |
Enjoy!
