alphabet to number and back?

Hello guys. I'm working on a new project and it's hard to explain why but is there any simply way of turning a letting into a number and a number into a letter? Like I want to be able to turn "c" into 3 since it's the 3rd letter. 7 into G since g is the 7th letter of the alphabet...ect.
I know i can do it by listing all 26 letters and stuff but is there some easy to use command for converting that I don't know about?

Not that I know...if you cast a character (not numeric) to an integer it retursn zero.

Despites the lack of memory that can generate...the use of a list to store 26 elemnts is not taht ackward.

well storing 26 elements in a wall of about 50 objects each with that script does make a difference. Thats ok I'll find a way around it.

Something like this should work...
Not in SL right now to test it..


Integer Function LetterToNumber(String incomingLetter)
{
list letters=["A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z"];
return llSubStringIndex(letters,incomingLetter)+1;
}

you can do the same thing with a string...

string alphabet = "_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
integer number = llSubStringIndex(alphabet, letter);

A cute trick is to waste a character at the front of the string, or list, so that "a" = position 1, rather than position "0"