title: Converting Letters to Numbers
body: <p>Let's say I have a program which converts letters to numbers such that:</p>
  
  <p>Input: abcd</p>
  
  <p>Output: 1234</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>How can I convert abcd to 1234 efficiently</li>
  <li>and how can I extract every individual char from the token</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>By the way, this is not homework. (this is for fun)</p>
  
  <p>This is what I have so far:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public class Test {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException  {
  
      BufferedReader f = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("test.in"));
  
      PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test.out.txt")));
  
      StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(f.readLine());
  
      int i1 = Integer.parseInt(st.nextToken());
  
              // How can I convert this into integers? (where a = 1, b = 2, and c = 3)
  
              out.println(????);
  
          out.close();
          System.exit(0);                              
  
      }
  
  }
  </code></pre>