Euler 22

Posted 24 Jun 2018 by Dougie

Project Euler again, this time Python. The problem is to sort a list of 5000 names alphabetically then give them a value. For example “COLIN” is 3 + 15 + 12 + 9 + 14 = 53 and is the 938th item – so its value is 49714 (53*938).

The biggest hurdle here is reading the file. It’s in one big blob of values wrapped in quotes and seperated by a comma.

def readFile():
    with open("data.txt", "r") as file:
        # The data file is a list of names in quotes
        # seperated by a comma.  The replace method
        # strips the quotes and the split seperates
        # by comma.
        names = file.read().replace('"','').split(",")
        return names

def alphaValue(name):
    # The unicode value for lowercase a is 97
    # but we want 1, hence the magic number!
    value = 0
    for letter in name.lower():
        value += (ord(letter) - 96)
    return value

# Read the data file and sort it.
names = sorted(readFile())
count = 0
position = 1
for name in names:
    count+=(alphaValue(name) * position)
    position+=1
print(count)