Adding numarical values to letters in C++...help please

I'm only 17 and i bought "C++ for dummies" about 3 months ago. As of right now this is purely a hobbie and i rarely sit down now adays and come up with stuff...but a math class a few months ago gave me a nifty idea. I'm going to write a program that codes/decodes messeges using matracies(SP?).

What i cant figure out how to do is to add a value to letters. I want A to be worth 1, and B to be 2 and C to be 3 and so on...

What would it look like?

Well, the ascii chars for the alphabet already have numerical values. Capital A = 97 and lowercase a = 65, if I recall correctly. The numbers increment from there. You could dump the values if you wanted with a simple loop:

So if you want A to correspond to a 1, you can just subtract from its ascii value. A more elegant method might be to use an enum or something, though.

If they already have values then i may be able to get it to work like that....

But when someone enters a string

"my name is bob"

does each letter have it's own value or is it differnt then?

if you have a string, you will need to parse out each character, then do what xwred1 suggested.

Depends on how you handle the string. If you are using the string type in C++ then you'd have to work something out on your own. If you were using cstrings, then its just an array of characters.

You could create a paired list and give each letter a value. Then grab each character and look up it's value in the table. Using STL this would be a sinch.