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Converting column number Excel column name

Quick little snippet needed while working on a web app that exports to an Excel worksheet. What I needed was a way to convert column numbers to the lettering that Excel uses. So, for example, column 27 would become AA.

Found a bulk of the solution at Stack Overflow. Logic wasn’t exactly what I was after and I needed it in PHP, but that post got me 99% of the way there.

function colByNumber($colNum) {
    $s = '';
    $colNum -= 1;
    do {
        $s = chr(ord('A') + ($colNum % 26)) . $s;
        $colNum /= 26;
    } while ((int)$colNum-- > 0);

    return $s;
}

Only note is that I was using one based indexing in my code, but zero based in this function. Easy enough to just subtract 1 from the column number before starting.

Published inProgramming

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