Question

I’d like to be able to output a letter in the same way that upper-alpha ordered lists do in HTML. For example:

<?php

    $letter_counter = 1;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "A".

    $letter_counter = 2;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "B".

    $letter_counter = 26;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "Z".

    $letter_counter = 27;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "AA".

    $letter_counter = 28;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "AB".

    $letter_counter = 52;
    echo get_letter($letter_counter);
    // Output should be "AZ".

?>

It should be able to go on indefinitely. What would the code for the “get_letter” function look like? I think the code shown on this page could be helpful, but I’m not sure how to get it to do what I want to do.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Why bother with $letter_counter = 2; (as a number) and just simply specify the last letter that you want.

Something like this might be of interest though:

$letter = 'A';
$lastLetter = 'ZZZ';
$lastLetter++;
do {
    echo $letter,PHP_EOL;
} while ($letter++ !== $lastLetter);

(You were aware that you can increment strings as well as number, weren’t you?)