A prize to the first person to correctly tell me what the function is for.

Probably a dictionary word retriever

Looks like a clbuttic swear word filter or something similar.

FAOD the snippet is a unit test, the Get method is what I was asking.

Confusing random devs on the internet

Those numbers aren't indexes, those letters are encoded digits, so the Get function encodes the number as the three letters. The first letter is clearly the most significant digit.

I got close to their numeric value by adding up their position in the alphabet bitwise shifted to the left a number of positions, but maybe there's something more to it, I don't know.

Am I overthinking it or does it make sense?

@ethernetzero You're very close.

Assert.AreEqual("FUC", Get(4605));

The Get function looks like the following:

def Get(n):
if n < 26:
Return char(n)
Return Get(floor(n/26)) + char(n % 26)

Where char (1) = 'a', char(2) = 'b', ...

Example:
Get(1189)=Get (1189/26)+char(1189%26)
=Get(45)+char(19)
=Get(1)+char(45%26)+char(19)
=Char(1)+char(19)+char(19)
='a'+'s'+'s' = "ass"

Actually, I don't know if it's correct, because if you do the mod of 26, the values range from 0 to 25, and if you map 1 to 'a', then there is no space for 'z'

Damn, I knew I was overthinking it. The wonders of going back to work and looking at it again when you get home: just came back and the solution popped in my head just like that, and it was so simple, man.

It's a base 26 converter. Not sure what you use it for, though.

A simple explanation of the conversion using Python:

>>> divmod(1189, 26)

(45, 19) → S, the 19th letter of the alphabet

>>> divmod(45, 26)

(1, 19) → S, again

>>> divmod(1, 26)

(0, 1) → A, the first letter

Take them in reverse order and boom, “ASS”.

The implementation I have (for an input variable n) is:

var s = "";

while (n > 0)

{

var k = (n - 1) % 26 + 1;

s = new string((char)(k + 64), 1) + s;

n -= k;

n /= 26;

}

return s;

@FlyingBird, the line where k is set is how you get around mod mapping to 0 to 25 rather than 1 to 26.

So the question is, why would somebody want to do this?

Maybe as a rudimentary way of masking IDs in URLs or something similar like generating short URLs? So, instead of:

http://example.com/something/123456

You'd have:

http://examp.le/s/fzph

OK, time’s up. I’ll tell you. It converts a 1-based column index to the column letter code used by Excel.

@ethernetzero, you were pretty close and persistent so you can have a prize.

@joycestick My cell phone is freaking out! 😆

@ethernetzero Have some headphones. 🎁

@joycestick Oh, nice, thanks!