help me with this script, just for fun.

[fuston05]

my wife likes to break names down into #'s, by assigning a # value to each letter determined by its natural numerical place in the alphabet. just for practice i was writing a program to automate this process for her.
so far i got:
print"This program will break down a persons name into #'s for Angela."

raw_input("hit enter to continue")

a=1
b=2
c=3
d=4
e=5
f=6
g=7
h=8
i=9
j=10
k=11
l=12
m=13
n=14
o=15
p=16
q=17
r=18
s=19
t=20
u=21
v=22
w=23
x=24
y=25
z=26

name=raw_input("What is the name you wish to annalize? Please use lower case letters only")

1st question: is there an easier way to assign values to each letter in alphabet?

2nd question: assuming im not heading entirely in the wrong direction with this script, haw would i assign afunction to the user inout to make it return a # value for "each" letter in a given name that might be entered?

ex. of intended function:   user entered: bob 
 return shud be: 2, 15, 2

[Alter Lobo]

1st question: is there an easier way to assign values to each letter in alphabet?

Sure. The most common encoding is the ASCII. Just type ASCII in a search engine to see the ASCII table.

Python can tell the ASCII code for a given character:

Code

>>> ord('a')
97
>>> ord('A')
65
>>> ord('0')
48
 

2nd question: assuming im not heading entirely in the wrong direction with this script, haw would i assign afunction to the user inout to make it return a # value for "each" letter in a given name that might be entered?

ex. of intended function:   user entered: bob 
 return shud be: 2, 15, 2

Use a for loop to loop over the characters of the name. For each character use the ord() function to print its ASCII code.

[fuston05]

you are awesome, ty yet again

[fuston05]

instead of using the "ascII" is there a way i can "assign my own numeric values to each individual letter throughout the alphabet?

[Alter Lobo]

You can create a dictionary:

Code

d = dict()
d['a'] = 1
d['b'] = 2
print d
 
e = {'a':1, 'b':2}
print e
 

Or do it programaticaly:

Code

my_encoding = dict()
for c in range(1, 59):
    char = chr(c + 64)
    my_encoding[char] = c
    print "dict['%s'] = %s" % (char, my_encoding[char])
 

[fuston05]

thanx alot