7 into 1

[nbrege]

I'm looking for a way to take seven 2 digit numbers & combine them into one number to store in a database. The numbers represent hours for each day of the week & I only have one field to store them in. Then I need to be able to take the stored number & decode it back into the original seven numbers. Anyone have any clever ideas how I can do this?

[techgnome]

convert them to strings, concatenate them, with some sort of delimiter in the middle? To get them back, read the string, & split on the delimiter.

-tg

[nbrege]

I thought of that, but the field in the database where I need to save the number is integer type, so that rules out saving it as a string with delimiters.

[JugglingReferee]

Can you datatype handle an integer value as high as

024,024,024,024,024,024,024?

Each grouping is the value for that day.

[SJWhiteley]

Are you sure it is an integer and not a long in the database?

But even so, if it's a maximum of 24 hours a day, then you could use a base 10 representation of a base 24 number (which would only be 7 digits long) which CAN be represented as an integer, I believe.

[Shaggy Hiker]

What JugglingReferee suggested would work as long as you are using a 64 bit integer. You can take each number as a single byte, then bit-shift each byte into one of the eight bytes in the Long Integer. You would be wasting tons of space in each byte, since you would only be using the low five bits. Alternatively, you could switch to non-military time, which would mean that you would have hours 1-12, which would fit into the low three bits of a byte. You could then use the fourth bit to indicate AM/PM. By doing that, you could pack all seven slots into four bytes, since each byte could hold two days.

[JugglingReferee]

what jugglingreferee suggested would work as long as you are using a 64 bit integer. You can take each number as a single byte, then bit-shift each byte into one of the eight bytes in the long integer. You would be wasting tons of space in each byte, since you would only be using the low five bits. alternatively, you could switch to non-military time, which would mean that you would have hours 1-12, which would fit into the low three bits of a byte. You could then use the fourth bit to indicate am/pm. By doing that, you could pack all seven slots into four bytes, since each byte could hold two days.

+1 !!