Programming Riddle: How might you translate an Excel column name to a number?

Question

I was recently asked in a job interview to resolve a programming puzzle that I thought it would be interesting to share. It\'s about translating Excel column letters to actu

Answer 1

You can do this in C like this:

unsigned int coltonum(char * string)
{
   unsigned result = 0;
   char ch;

   while(ch = *string++)
      result = result * 26 + ch - 'A' + 1;

  return result;
}

No error checking, only works for upper case strings, string must be null terminated.

Answer 2

Here is another version of this code in Python:

keycode=1
for i in range (1,len(word)):
    numtest[i]=word[i-1]
    keycode = keycode*26*int(wordtest[numtest[i]])
last=word[-1:]
keycode=keycode+int(wordtest[last])
print(keycode)
print(bin(keycode))
#Numtest and wordtest are dictionaries.

Answer 3

I wrote this ages ago for some Python script:

def index_to_int(index):
    s = 0
    pow = 1
    for letter in index[::-1]:
        d = int(letter,36) - 9
        s += pow * d
        pow *= 26
    # excel starts column numeration from 1
    return s

Answer 4

Read a column name from STDIN and print out its corresponding number:

perl -le '$x = $x * 26 - 64 + ord for <> =~ /./g; print $x'

Caveats: Assumes ASCII.

EDIT: Replaced " with ' so that your shell won't interpolate $x in the string.

Answer 5

Another Delphi one:

function ExcelColumnNumberToLetter(col: Integer): string;
begin
  if (col <= 26) then begin
    Result := Chr(col + 64);
  end
  else begin
    col := col-1;
    Result := ExcelColumnNumberToLetter(col div 26) + ExcelColumnNumberToLetter((col mod 26) + 1);
  end;
end;

Answer 6

Delphi:

// convert EXcel column name to column number 1..256
// case-sensitive; returns 0 for illegal column name
function cmColmAlfaToNumb( const qSRC : string ) : integer;
var II : integer;
begin
   result := 0;
   for II := 1 to length(qSRC) do begin
      if (qSRC[II]<'A')or(qSRC[II]>'Z') then begin
         result := 0;
         exit;
      end;
      result := result*26+ord(qSRC[II])-ord('A')+1;
   end;
   if result>256 then result := 0;
end;

-Al.