Get the Sum of the Values of Letters in a Name-CodePudding

Numerologists claim to be able to determine a person's character traits based on the "numeric value" of a name. The value of a name is determined by summing up the values of the letters of the name. For example, the name Zelle would have the value 26 5 12 12 5 = 60. Write a function called get_numeric_value that takes a sequence of characters (a string) as a parameter. It should return the numeric value of that string. You can use to_numerical in your solution.

Just to preface, this is an exercise I have to do for a lab in my programming class. It's been asked here before (sorry!) but none of the results really helped address the issue I was having with it.

First, my code for to_numerical (a function I had to make to convert letters to numbers [notably not the ASCII codes; had to start from A = 1, etc.]) was this:

def to_numerical(character): 
    if character.isupper():
        return ord(character) - 64
    elif character.islower():
        return ord(character) - 96

In regards to the actual problem, I'm stuck since I can only get the function to return the value of the Z in Zelle (which is supposed to be 26 here). I've pasted what I have so far below:

def get_numeric_value(string):
    numerals = []
    for character in string:
        if character.isupper():
            return ord(character) - 64
        elif character.islower():
            return ord(character) - 96
        return numerals
    addition = sum(numerals)
    return addition

I was thinking I would probably have to use sum() at some point, but I think the issue is more that I'm not getting all of the letters returned to the numerals list. How can I get it so the code will add up and return all the letters? I've been trying to think something up for an hour but I'm stumped.

CodePudding user response：

You should just use a sum variable and add to it each character value and then return that sum:

def get_numeric_value(string):
    numerals = []
    sum = 0
    for character in string:
        if character.isupper():
            sum  = ord(character) - 64
        elif character.islower():
            sum  = ord(character) - 96
    return sum