convert "forty five" to "45"

I'm looking for an elegant way to convert one thru one hundred to "1" thru "100". The end result can either be an integer or a String representation of the value. Is there a clever way to accomplish this transformation or do I need to create a hashmap with 100 entries mapping the text to the number?
Many thanks!

There may not be an elegant way to pull this off. You could use a combination of Maps and Regexes that employ capturing groups but anyway you slice it the logic gets nasty. For example English has numbers like eleven, twelve, fifteen, eighteen which would have to be handled with logic separate from teens like fourteen, sixteen, seventeen which could be handled in a similar manner to twenty one, twenty two, twenty three by dropping the white space (or dash) between the words. Then there would need to be logic that allowed one, two, three, etc to stand alone or to only follow twenty, thirty, forty, etc and reverse that for twenty, thirty, forty, etc. If you used two capturing groups for some of the teens, then you would need to check for those that do not comply as mentioned above. And one must be allowed to precede hundred.

The best I could come up with was 27 nested "if" statements.

import java.util.StringTokenizer;
public class StringNumberToValue 
{
  public static void main(String[] args) 
  {
    System.out.println( "Fifty Five --> " + StringNumberToValue.convert( "Fifty Five"));
    System.out.println( "Fourty Three --> " + StringNumberToValue.convert( "Fourty Three"));
    System.out.println( "Twelve --> " + StringNumberToValue.convert( "Twelve"));
    System.out.println( "Ninety Nine --> " + StringNumberToValue.convert( "Ninety Nine"));
  }
  private StringNumberToValue() { /* do not instantiate */ }
  public static int convert( String text)
  {
    StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer( text);
    int result = 0;
    while( tokenizer.hasMoreTokens())
    {
      String token = tokenizer.nextToken().toLowerCase();
      
      if( token.equals( "one"))
        result += 1;
      else if( token.equals( "two"))
        result += 2;
      else if( token.equals( "three"))
        result += 3;
      else if( token.equals( "four"))
        result += 4;
      else if( token.equals( "five"))
        result += 5;
      else if( token.equals( "six"))
        result += 6;
      else if( token.equals( "seven"))
        result += 7;
      else if( token.equals( "eight"))
        result += 8;
      else if( token.equals( "nine"))
        result += 9;
      else if( token.equals( "ten"))
        result += 10;
      else if( token.equals( "eleven"))
        result += 11;
      else if( token.equals( "twelve"))
        result += 12;
      else if( token.equals( "thirteen"))
        result += 13;
      else if( token.equals( "fourteen"))
        result += 14;
      else if( token.equals( "fifteen"))
        result += 15;
      else if( token.equals( "sixteen"))
        result += 16;
      else if( token.equals( "seventeen"))
        result += 17;
      else if( token.equals( "eighteen"))
        result += 18;
      else if( token.equals( "nineteen"))
        result += 19;
      else if( token.equals( "twenty"))
        result += 20;
      else if( token.equals( "thirty"))
        result += 30;
      else if( token.equals( "fourty"))
        result += 40;
      else if( token.equals( "fifty"))
        result += 50;
      else if( token.equals( "sixty"))
        result += 60;
      else if( token.equals( "seventy"))
        result += 70;
      else if( token.equals( "eighty"))
        result += 80;
      else if( token.equals( "ninety"))
        result += 90;
    }
    return result;
  }
}

Tom Blough

Take Tom's solution, and put the string literals and the integers into a HashMap (you'd have to wrap the ints as Integer objects.) Then the main loop is just a single HashMap lookup: