string conversion and manipulation

Question

I am completely new to C# and fairly new to programming, so my apologies in advance if I can't make sense out of my own question! Here is what I have to do. I need to read a string of 3 characters and convert them according to the following scheme. a=1, b=2, c=3, .....and so on. I also will need to read in a zip code. I don't know if I can or should read the zip code in as an integer. Having read both of these in I then need to combine them into 1 number. For example, I read in abc and the zip code 45678. What I want to end up with is the number 12,345,678. I appreciate any help you can give.

Tanvir Huda · Answer

jUst wondering for string conversion to a interger or decimal can't u use int i=int.parse(your_string); or double d=double.Parse(your_string); //your_string='123456';

cdcaruso · Answer

This is extremely helpful. Thank you so much! One thing I noticed though is that if the alpa string contains a value higher than a single digit I would have to multiply the runningnumber * 100 before adding the value but I think I can handle that. For example the string is abz...I would need 1226 rather than 146. Thank you everyone I think I might be able to pull this thing off now!!

spgilmore · Answer

Another way (one I've used forever) is to use the ASCII value of the char. Most encodings include the ascii table including the default encoding. 'A'=65 'a'=97 '0'=48 To convert 'a' 'b' 'c' to 1 2 3 do this: byte chartobyte(char c) { byte b = (byte) c; if ( (b >= 97) && (b = 97) && (b = 65) && (b = 48) && (b <= 48 + 9) ) { return (byte) (b-48); } else return 0; } So if you have a string that contains abc named alpha and a string that contains 45678 named zipcode then you could do this: private void button1_Click(object sender System.EventArgs e) { MessageBox.Show( (myconvert(abc45678)*2).ToString() ); } int myconvert(string aalpha string azipcode) { int runningnumber = 0; char[] alpha = aalpha.ToCharArray(); char[] zipcode = azipcode.ToCharArray(); int j; for (j=0; j<alpha.Length; j++) { runningnumber *= 10; runningnumber += chartobyte(alpha[j]); } for (j=0; j<zipcode.Length; j++) { runningnumber *= 10; runningnumber += chartobyte(zipcode[j]); } return runningnumber; }

cdcaruso · Answer

Thank you both very much for the help. I understand now how to change the letters to the correct corresponding number but I'm still confused on one thing. If i have a string like 12345 how do I convert or use that string as a number to do further calculations? For example for the string 12345 how do I make that into the number 12345 so that I could say multiply it by 2 and have 24690? Thanks again for all your help I'm so glad I found this site!

Tanvir Huda · Answer

Yeah that seems to me a great solution. Have a case ladder. Anyway there is lot more way to do it . You can have a two Array that map each other by index. And may have arraylist but still case ladder is cool solution. But i have another thing to try. I put that on and it works . Have a look string s=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz; ASCIIEncoding AE = new ASCIIEncoding ( ); byte[] b=AE.GetBytes(s); for(int i=0;i<b.Length;i++) { int j=int.Parse(b[i].ToString()); j=j-96; MessageBox.Show(j.ToString()); } for your purpose u can read it from textbox and separate the first 3 char and convert that to int and concate with the zip code (this part shown in my previous example) . So this will work. BTW ASCIIEncoding is in System.Text namespace

gjghkhj · Answer

I can't think of an easy way to convert the letters to numbers apart from somethink like a manual case statement - string ConvertLetter(string letter) { switch (letter) { case a: return 1; case b: return 2; ... ... } } .. but surely there is an easier and quicker way. If you can't find one just seperate the letters like shayer009 suggested and pass each one into a method like the above one. You will want to convert your zip to a string and pass each letter back as a string so you can append the numbers without adding them - 2 + 5 = 25 not 8.

cdcaruso · Answer

Thank you so much for replying shayer but I don't think this is what I'm looking for. It's likely that its my misunderstanding of the language though. Once I have any 3 character string I need to first convert each character to a number and then append those numbers to the zip code to make one larger number. For example the user enters the string bed. I need to convert that to 254 according to the conversion indicated in my original post and append it to any zip code entered. If the user entered 99999 as the zip I need the number 25499999 to do further calculations. Thanks again for your help. I hope I'm not sounding too hopeless here!

Tanvir Huda · Answer

Hello New2Csharp I dont have the clear understanding of ur problem though the following code listing may help u string s=textBox1.Text; string s1=s.Substring(01); string s2=s.Substring(11); string s3=s.Substring(21); string a=a=+s1; string b=b=+s2; string c=c=+s3; string zipcode=45678; string str=s1+s2++s3+zipcode.Substring(02)++zipcode.Substring(2zipcode.Length-2); MessageBox.Show(a+
+b+
+c+
+str); All the best to u man Good Luck