Spreadsheet Encoding
In this lesson, you will learn how to convert the column IDs in a spreadsheet into an integer in Python.
We'll cover the following...
In this lesson, we will be considering how to solve the problem of implementing a function that converts a spreadsheet column ID (i.e., “A”, “B”, “C”, …, “Z”, “AA”, etc.) to the corresponding integer. For example, “A” equals 1 because it represents the first column, while “AA” equals 27 because it represents the 27th column.
We will cover how to solve this problem algorithmically, and then code a solution to this question in Python.
The key insight is to think of the column IDs as base 26 integers.
In the illustration below, you can see how we represent “314” as a base 10 number.
From the illustration above, you can easily deduce the general formula. We start from the left-most digit and multiply it with the base raised to the power of ...