#22 - Names scores

in Project Euler on 5%

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 x 53 = 49714.

What is the total of all the name scores in the file?

The problem itself tells us how to solve it. There is no need for anything complicated. In Python, there is the ord() function, which returns the ASCII integer code for the given character. Additionally, since “A” has a value of 65, we need to subtract 64 from the value of ord() so that “A” properly maps to 1.

# file: "problem022.py"
# Each name is in double quotes, separated
# by commas. So remove the quotes and split on the comma.
with open("problem022.txt") as f:
    names = f.readline().replace('"', '').split(',')
names.sort()  # sort alphabetically

total = 0

for i, name in enumerate(names, 1):
    score = 0
    # For each letter, grab the ASCII code integer,
    # and subtract 64, because 'A' is 64.
    for chara in name:
        score += ord(chara) - 64
    score *= i + 1
    total += score
print(total)

Running this simple loop, we get

871522818
0.007237999991048127 seconds.

Thus, 871522818 is our answer.