Question

I am faced with the following issue. I need to capture a range of serial numbers in c# to be stored in a database. If these serial numbers are just numbers, it is fine, but I have ran into serial numbers which are alpha-numeric such as:

56AAA71064D6 and 56AAA7105A25

How can I accommodate the different possibilities that serial number ranges may be in?

Assuming that all serial numbers have some order, how can I parse the sequential part of it?

The database takes the serial numbers as strings already.

Answer 1

If your serial numbers have same width then its easy…

you have to use string.compare method to get the range.

int MaxLength = 20;

private string Pad(string val){
   if(val.Length < 20){
      val = new String('0', MaxLength - val.Length) + val;
   }
   return val;
}

public bool IsBetween(string num, string start, string end){
    num = Pad(num);
    start = Pad(num);
    end = Pad(num);
    return String.Compare(num,start)>=0 && String.Compare(num,end)<=0;
}

And if you sort all serial numbers, then you can easily pickup range.

If they are not of same width then you have to padd 0 before smaller length strings to make them all same size.