To split a number into digits in a given base, Julia has the digits()
function:
julia> digits(36, base = 4)
3-element Array{Int64,1}:
0
1
2
What's the reverse operation? If you have an array of digits and the base, is there a built-in way to convert that to a number? I could print the array to a string and use parse()
, but that sounds inefficient, and also wouldn't work for bases > 10.
The answer seems to be written directly within the documentation of digits
:
help?> digits
search: digits digits! ndigits isdigit isxdigit disable_sigint
digits([T<:Integer], n::Integer; base::T = 10, pad::Integer = 1)
Return an array with element type T (default Int) of the digits of n in the given base,
optionally padded with zeros to a specified size. More significant digits are at higher
indices, such that n == sum([digits[k]*base^(k-1) for k=1:length(digits)]).
So for your case this will work:
julia> d = digits(36, base = 4);
julia> sum([d[k]*4^(k-1) for k=1:length(d)])
36
And the above code can be shortened with the dot operator:
julia> sum(d.*4 .^(0:(length(d)-1)))
36
The previous answers are correct, but there is also the matter of efficiency:
sum([x[k]*base^(k-1) for k=1:length(x)])
collects the numbers into an array before summing, which causes unnecessary allocations. Skip the brackets to get better performance:
sum(x[k]*base^(k-1) for k in 1:length(x))
This also allocates an array before summing: sum(d.*4 .^(0:(length(d)-1)))
If you really want good performance, though, write a loop and avoid repeated exponentiation:
function undigit(d; base=10)
s = zero(eltype(d))
mult = one(eltype(d))
for val in d
s += val * mult
mult *= base
end
return s
end
This has one extra unnecessary multiplication, you could try to figure out some way of skipping that. But the performance is 10-15x better than the other approaches in my tests, and has zero allocations.
Edit: There's actually a slight risk to the type handling above. If the input vector and base
have different integer types, you can get a type instability. This code should behave better:
function undigits(d; base=10)
(s, b) = promote(zero(eltype(d)), base)
mult = one(s)
for val in d
s += val * mult
mult *= b
end
return s
end