How to generate number sequence of base 3

Question

I am trying to write a program to generate a number sequence of base 3. The method will take an input n and will print all the sequence from 0 to n.

The problem is that I am not sure how to write this. I tried searching but didn't get any relevant links. Can someone provide me the concept of how to do it and then I will code this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This isn't the entire solution to your problem, but it gives you the core of what you need to work with. You'll have to wrap it in a function and build a loop to call that function for each number.

Assuming you're given a number, you can get the characters for the base-n representation pretty simply. For example:

desiredBase = 3;
number = 42;

do
{
    digit = number % desiredBase;
    write(digit);
    number = number / desiredBase;
} (while number > 0)

That's going to output the digits in reverse order, but you get the idea. You'll have to buffer them and then reverse the digits before outputting.

Oh, and there's a little bit of weirdness for negative numbers.

You might look for the source of the C function itoa, which will create the base-n representation of a given number. You should be able to find that easy enough with a Google search.

Or just look up "number base conversion" and you'll get lots of hits.