JavaScript Snippet – Parse A Spreadsheet Address

Today I am starting work on a quick flashcard app that will use Google Docs to read data from a spreadsheet. I thought I had written and published a function which parses an Excel like cell address and converts it into the column number and the row number but I wasn’t able to find it. Thusly I wrote the following parseAddress function:

/**
 * Takes in a cell address and returns an array containing the corresponding
 * column number followed by the row number.
 * @param {string} strCellAddr  The address of the cell (eg. AD32).
 * @return {!Array.<number>}  An array of two numbers:  the column number and
 *     the row number.
 */
function parseAddress(strCellAddr) {
  var i = strCellAddr.search(/\d/);
  var colNum = 0;
  strCellAddr = +strCellAddr.replace(/\D/g, function(letter) {
    colNum += (parseInt(letter, 36) - 9) * Math.pow(26, --i);
    return '';
  });
  return [colNum, strCellAddr];
}

This function takes the cell address as a string (eg. AD32) and converts it to an array (eg. [30, 32]). The first value in the array will be the column number and the second will be the row number.