Generating a character serial AAAA, AAAB, AAAC

Marvin kakuru

Hi All, I hope all is well. i have been trying to generate a unique identity code for each data record and i trying to use characters for example AAAA. AAAB, AAAC.

Now i move to the last record and the record appears in textbox1 as "AAAC" , but i would like to generate the next unique identity code character "AAAD" into another textbox2. how can i get about this.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. I using c sharp.
thanks

5 Replies

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Vulpes15y ago
Accepted answer
Something like this perhaps:

// add this method to your form

private string GetNextId(string id)
{
// if id is invalid return an empty string, say
if (id == null || id.Length != 4) return "";
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
if (id[i] < 'A' || id[i] > 'Z') return "";
}

int code = (id[0] - 65) * 26 * 26 * 26 + (id[1] - 65) * 26 * 26 + (id[2] - 65) * 26 + (id[3] - 65);
code++;
char[] chars = new char[4];
for(int i = 3; i >= 0; i--)
{
chars[i] = (char)(code % 26 + 65);
code /= 26;
}
return new string(chars);
}

// now call from a button_Click handler (or whatever) with:

textBox2.Text = GetNextId(textBox1.Text.Trim());

Note that when you get to "ZZZZ", the method as it stands will return the next id as "AAAA".
Sam Hobbs15y ago
You just need to ask for clarification. I would have explained what I meant. As it happened, my time was wasted. So can you understand that I did not want to waste more time? If you had asked for clarification then I would know it was not a waste of time to provide clarification.
Marvin kakuru15y ago
Hai Sam thanks concern, unfortunately i have never been to class to study programming, though i am really committed to this feild.so it is abit difficult for me to understand the terms that you use.
Fortunately tho vulpes has sent me code that has done just what i needed.
Thanks for your concern again.
Marvin kakuru15y ago
Hai Vulpes thanks alot it worked very well.God bless you men.
Sam Hobbs15y ago
I am not sure what it is you need to do.

What set of characters do you need to use for the identity code? If you can use a set of 64 characters then you can use base 64. In other words if you can use the set of characters a-z in both lower case and upper case plus the digits 0-9 plus 2 other characters to generate an id then you can use base 64. To do that you just need an array of bytes with binary values to be converted.

Otherwise it depends on the set of characters. You could write a function that converts a 32-bit or 64-bit number to some other base, such as base 26 or base 52 or whatever.

So there are many options; the solution depends somewhat on the requirements. Can you be more specific?