given a word, print its index, words can be increased accordingly

Question

Imagine an alphabet of words.

Example:

 a ==> 1 
 b ==> 2 
 c ==> 3 

 z ==> 26 
 ab ==> 27 
 ac ==> 28 

 az ==> 51 
 bc ==> 52         


        

Answer 1

This is a combination of two problems: parsing a number in a base that isn't 10 and determining if input is sorted.

Note that, since this is probably homework, you probably can't just use existing methods to do the hard work.