Question

I know there must be a generic method but I don’t even know the term to search for and I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, badly.

‘Separate components values‘ and ‘composite values‘ don’t give good results.

another example: degrees+minutes+seconds from seconds of arc, or tons+pounds+ounces from ounces.

I’m working in C but it shouldn’t be too hard to translate from some other language.

The inputs would be the basic value, say total inches= 9534567, and the unit divisions, like feet=12, yards=feet*3, miles=yards*1760. The output would be 150 miles, 849 yards, 0 feet and 3 inches.

Surely this can be generalized to use some other set of unit divisions. And a whole library seems like overkill, doesn’t it?

Answer 1

As mentioned, this is more difficult when dealing with non-standard lengths of intermediate elements. However, given a standard set of breaks you could compute using the following:

void components (long value, long * parts, int parts_sz, long * result) {

    int i = 0;
    for (; i < parts_sz; ++i) {
        result[i] = value / parts[i];
        value %= parts[i];
    }
}

int main () {

    int i = 0;
    long parts[] = {10000, 1000,100,10,1}, result[] = {0,0,0,0,0};
    long value = 99853;

    components (value, parts, 5, result);

    for (; i < 5; ++i)
        printf ("There were %ld %lds\n", result[i], parts[i]);

    retrun 0;
}

Which yields:

There were 9 10000s
There were 9 1000s
There were 8 100s
There were 5 10s
There were 3 1s