Unique ID Generator

[LostS]

Hey Everyone Again,

OK on today's plate I gotta find a way to do this. I have a ID I must generate. The Formula for this ID is something like "REG-RC-XXXX" Where the X's are those are numbers. So it would be like REG-RC-0001 and so forth... Now I have no problem incrementing... my issue is how do I make it be a 4 digit pattern?? So it will be 0001 and 0201 and so forth??

Any Help you all can give is GREATLY appricated

Thank you all in Advance for the help
Billy S.

[scain]

What? I read your question several times, and still don't understand what you want. Could you please make it a little more clear.

Scott

Ahh, thank you, Masem. I get it now (at least I think so, right, LostS?)

[LostS]

OK I have a ID I have to assign with each submission. The ID looked like this REG-RC-0000 . The 0000 is a number so it would be 0001 and then 0002 and so forth... My Question is how do I make it always 4 characters in length. If I take a number and do a ++ to it wont it change 0001 to 2??

[Masem]

sprintf is your friend:

my $uniqid = sprintf( "REG-RC-%04d", $id++ );

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - [e-mail] || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

[LostS]

So using the sprintf will put the $id variable where %04d is located?? Trying to figure out in what order I need to do the read and write of the ID.

[LostS]

Hey Masem... I tried this out... Can you look at this and see where I went wrong??

$id = 0;
while ($id < 50) {
    print "Position ID: $positionid<br />\n";
    my $positionid = sprintf( "REG-RC-%04d", $id++ );
}

This is what it printed:

Position ID: REG-RC-0000
Position ID: REG-RC-0000
Position ID: REG-RC-0000
Position ID: REG-RC-0000
Position ID: REG-RC-0000
.....
Did that 50 times...

Any Suggestions??

Billy S.

[LostS]

Nevermind... I am just dumb and reordered the print statement and the sprintf and it works great :)

Thank you SOOOO much :)

Billy S.

[Masem]

The my declaration is messing things up here, as the value you set here is going to be only local to the block and AFTER the print statement, so it's lost.

Try this code:

my $id = 0;
my $positionid;
while ( $id < 50 ) {
   $positionid = sprinft( "REG-RC-%04d", $id++ );
   print "Position ID: $positionid<br />\n";
}

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - [e-mail] || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

[isotope]

Using -w and strict will help you catch errors like this in your future work.

--isotope
http://www.skylab.org/~isotope/

[dga]

The one caveat that I can see is that when you run out of your 4 digit number that it will expand to more digits like

REG-RC-9999
REG-RC-10000

If you aren't going to have 10000 of these then you should be ok.

Otherwise you will need to do some stuff like going to REG-RD-0000 after REG-RD-9999.

[LostS]

Well they came to me and said I could bump it up to a 5 diget number :-P

If they get 99,999 job positions to fill in the next 4 years... Then DAMN.. That is good right??

[Hofmator]

I thought I just mention that we have a good tutorial about (s)printf here at PM. You might want to take a look at it - there are more nice things you can do with (s)printf: Using (s)printf()

-- Hofmator

[John M. Dlugosz]

Try magic increment, too.

my $ID= "0001";
foreach (1..20) {
   print "REG-RC-$ID\t";
   ++$ID;
   }

[mitd]

'Holy Binary Dumps'

Persistently yours File::CounterFile.

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'