Task — String score

You are given a string, $str. Write a script to return the score of the given string. The score of a string is defined as the sum of the absolute difference between the ASCII values of adjacent characters.

Examples

Example 1
Input: $str = "hello"
Output: 13

ASCII values of characters:
h = 104
e = 101
l = 108
l = 108
o = 111

Score => |104 - 101| + |101 - 108| + |108 - 108| + 
         |108 - 111|
      => 3 + 7 + 0 + 3
      => 13

Example 2
Input: "perl"
Output: 30

ASCII values of characters:
p = 112
e = 101
r = 114
l = 108

Score => |112 - 101| + |101 - 114| + |114 - 108|
      => 11 + 13 + 6
      => 30

Example 3
Input: "raku"
Output: 37

ASCII values of characters:
r = 114
a = 97
k = 107
u = 117

Score => |114 - 97| + |97 - 107| + |107 - 117|
      => 17 + 10 + 10
      => 37

Analysis

This is easily done in one line of code.

The task does specify ASCII, but at no extra cost we can include any Unicode characters, which gives us some larger scores.

Try it 

Script

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Blog: http://ccgi.campbellsmiths.force9.co.uk/challenge

use v5.26;    # The Weekly Challenge - 3 June 2024
use utf8;     # Week 272 - task 2 - String score
use warnings; # Peter Campbell Smith
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

string_score('hello');
string_score('supercalifragilisticexpialidocious');
string_score('The Weekly Challenge');
string_score('aĐbđcĒeēfĔgĕh🞱');

sub string_score {
    
    my ($score);
    
    $score += abs(ord(substr($_[0], $_, 1)) - 
        ord(substr($_[0], $_ - 1, 1))) 
        for 1 .. length($_[0]) - 1;
    say qq[\nInput:  $_[0]\nOutput: $score];    
}

Output

Input:  hello
Output: 13

Input:  supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Output: 242

Input:  The Weekly Challenge
Output: 385

Input:  aĐbđcĒeēfĔgĕh🞱
Output: 130928