Question

Recently, while doing a printer layout programmatically in Java, I stumbled across the problem of aligning certain numbers and to have them right-aligned I needed to have a count of the amount of digits in each number. What would be the easiest way to do this?

Answer 1

While I was breaking my head over an algorithm on how to do this the simplest, a friend of mine pointed out a very simple solution: simply put the number in a string and count its length ;-). No need to make things hard on yourself with mathematical formulas! In Java for example:

String number_s = ""+number;
int digits = number_s.length();

This can be applied to decimal numbers aswell, after splitting the string on the separating delimiter (usually . or ,).

Hope I can save at least someone some time with this.