Question

I’ve been given a datafile where the original creator used alphabetical rather than numeric values to show order.

For example, if there’s ten items, they’d be named:

12342313A
12342313B
12342313C
12342313D
12342313E
...

I need to import these values into a mySQL table that has order as a required int column, and I need to convert the letter to a number.

Is there a function in PHP to get a numeric value for a letter? Or will I need to do a substr to grab the trailing letter, and create an indexed array of letters and just do a lookup against that array?

I’m hesitant to do the simple way above, since I don’t know how many objects could potentially exist, and I could need to write an array from A-AAAA or something.

Answer 1

use ord() with substr and subtract 64. This will set A to 1, B to 2, etc…