Problem 22 on Project Euler proves a text file containing a large number of comma-delimited names and asks us to calculate the numeric sum of the alphabetical score for each name multiplied by the name’s position in the original list. This is made slightly easier by the presence of the predefined LETTERS variable in R.
problem22 <- function() {
namelist <- scan(file="c:/temp/names.txt", sep=",", what="", na.strings="")
sum(unlist(
lapply(namelist,
function(Z) which(namelist==Z) * sum(match(unlist(strsplit(Z,"")), LETTERS)))))
}