I am required to store a time value in an integer in the format of HHMMSS. this time value is incrementing every second (basically a custom clock). however, since integers are naturally 10 based, I must implement a large cumbersome logic that extracts each digits and checks for 60 seconds in a minutes, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours a day. I wonder if there is some clever ways to do it without a massive if/else if chunk.
2 Answers
You can use the modulus operator to pick out each of the components of a single seconds counter:
int totalSeconds;
...
int seconds = totalSeconds % 60;
int minutes = (totalSeconds / 60) % 60;
int hours = (totalSeconds / 3600);
Then you can just increment a single seconds counter and extract each of the components.
Comments
My suggestion would be to implement a CustomClock class, which could look something like:
public class CustomClock {
private int hour;
private int minute;
private int second;
public CustomClock(int hour, int minute, int second) {
this.hour = hour;
// ...
}
public void increment() {
second = second + 1)%60;
if (second == 0) minute = (minute + 1)%60;
if (minute == 0) hour = (hour + 1)%24;
}
}
Thus taking advantage of the mod operator (%) to compute arbitrary base numbers.
HHMMSStime in an integer like that is daft. Use separate fields for the hours, minutes and seconds ... or deal with it when you render the (single) integer field for display.