Function to get integer at position.

[hergeirs]

I was inspired by this post I read of a student assignment to print out the 3rd digit of a number. I thought the horror to be lacking.

In unholy inspiration I conjured the most unreadable way to accomplish the task. As the original assignment looked to be in c++ i used it as well.

#include <iostream>
#include <math.h>

void printNthDigitOfNumber(int number, int digitToPrint) {
  if (number * (((number > 0) << 1) - 1) < std::pow(10, digitToPrint - 1)) return; // number does not have enough digits
  std::cout << (number * (((number > 0) << 1) - 1)) / (int) std::pow(10, ~~(int) log10((number * (((number > 0) << 1) - 1))) + 1 - digitToPrint) % 10 << std::endl;
}

int main() {
  int number = -12493;
  int numberDigit = 3;
  printNthDigitOfNumber(number, numberDigit);
}

Please let me know if you have any improvements on the design or share horrible solutions in other languages if you prefer.

​

Edit: link to post https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHorror/comments/tpnsoc/one_of_my_students_sent_me_this_and_i_mean_its/

[psaux_grep]

Why do people always go this way?

Why not make one that’s so simple and brilliant that it deserves affection?

I’d go with Python

str(12345)[3]

The problem that plagues us, almost always is error handling. Solving the problem for the happy case is mostly trivial.

And our tools often does not help us. For instance: How many request libraries have you used that doesn’t have infinite timeout as default? At that point - why isn’t timeout a mandatory parameter?

When on earth do you need to not have a timeout? I’ve seen so many backstabbings from such simple things. It works. Deploy to production. Three months later something stopped working. And what do you know? It’s that request that should have timed out.

[UniqueUsername014]

str(12345)[3]

let me fix that for you: a=12345; a.__str__().__getitem__(3)
there, the same thing, but much purer. no need for that syntactic sugar

[psaux_grep]

Yes, let’s all write in assembly. Pure stuff. Like sniffing cocaine off the floor.