[Resolved] letter / number substitution in a string.

[stevesweetland]

is there a quick way to turn this string :

"abcdcba";

into

"1234321";

Ya get what im doing, swapping the letter (uppercase or not) for the number of its position in the alphabet.

z is 26, you get the idea.

dont worry about uppercase or anything, ill ALWAYS be making the string lower case, and stripping anything that isnt a letter out of it (spaces, grammar marks, etc)

if there is a handy php function that will either turn "a" to "1" or "1" to "a", i can write a little function to do it.

im trying to avoid setting up an array of 26 vars where i split apart the string and use comparisons to get the value.

[stevesweetland]

function magicfunction($string){
  $newString = "";
  for($char=0;$char<strlen($string);$char++){
    $char =
    $variance = isuppercase($char)?"96":"65";
    $newString .= ord(substr($string,$char,1))-$variance;
  }
  return $newString;
};

this is the bit of code im using.