Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Seth Godin published this image on his blog Lonely, scared and bitter. Seth is one of the smartest person on the Internet space, and may be I’m the stupidest person. And that’s probably why I’m not getting that post. I get that image, but with a different title for that post. So republishing the same image, with my perspective – busy, happy and prosperous.

I can’t help it, my blood says B+ve. I strive for the top-right corner, so seeing only that on this image.

Have a great weekend ahead.

I’m working on an interesting project right now, and for this project, I wanted to generate URLs with sequential alphabetic sequence as opposed to using numeric IDs. Using alphabetic string allows me to use short URL addresses with many URL combinations. E.g. If I use numeric indexes, then I can only have 10 possibilities to represent http://abc.com/N, where N= 0 to 9. But instead, if I use alphabetic character, I have 26 possibilities where N= a, b, c to z. I don’t want to add usability issues by using both upper and lower cases of alphabets, so I’ll stick to lower case addresses only.

So I needed a function which will generate sequential alphabetic strings for URL address based on incremental numbers. So I coded up following function:

function getAlphaString($num)
{
  $alpha = '';
  while($num >= 1) {
    $num = $num - 1;
    $alpha = chr(($num % 26)+97) . $alpha;
    $num = $num / 26;
  }
  return $alpha;
}

Use this in a for{} loop, and it will give you sequential strings. Or call with individual numbers as shown below, and it will return you appropriate alphabetic string.

echo getAlphaString(5) . "\n";
echo getAlphaString(500) . "\n";
echo getAlphaString(500000) . "\n";
echo getAlphaString(50000000) . "\n";

And it produced following output:

e
sf
abkpt
dejtlx

Hope you’ll find this function useful in one of your applications.