Question

I want to create a function which will a number and the position of the digit that I want to retrieve,

int getDigit(int value, int positionFromLeft)

Say, getDigit(534, 2) will return 3.

What could be the easiest / efficient way to write this function?

Answer 1

All these string-based solutions scare me… Really guys? :-/

int getDigit(int value, int positionFromLeft)
{
    int posFromRight = 1;
    {
        int v = value;
        while (v /= 10)
            ++posFromRight;
    }
    posFromRight -= positionFromLeft - 1;
    while (--posFromRight)
        value /= 10;
    value %= 10;
    return value > 0 ? value : -value;
}

Note that passing an out-of-bounds value for positionFromLeft won’t return any sensical value as-is.