multiple measurements converter/ calculator?

February 13, 2015 5:52 AM

i have a string of measurements i would like increased by X. I've found many calculators that can do (1) measurement at a time, but is there one that does several at once? (when i say "convert" i mean increase in the same unit, not necessarily shifting/'converting' the unit to a different unit) (i.e. 1,3,5,7,9,13,15,17 inches all increased by X)
posted by mrmarley to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Excel is perfect for this or any spreadsheet program.
posted by hydrobatidae at 5:58 AM on February 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah seems like excel would do fine. Barring that, a few lines of almost any programming language would work. Let's say foo.txt had a list of numbers, 1 per line. In my case mine are 1, 2, 3 and 4

I opened python and typed this in:
(the stuff after >>> or ... are lines I typed, everything else is output)

>>> for line in open("foo.txt"):
... print float(line)+5
...
6.0
7.0
8.0
9.0
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:48 AM on February 13, 2015

An easy-to-use programming language like Ruby would also work very well. If you would like to give that a shot, head to http://tryruby.org/.

Also worth checking out is http://www.wolframalpha.com. Example.
posted by one of these days at 6:52 AM on February 13, 2015

This is what spreadsheets like Excel, OpenOffice, and Google Sheets excel (sorry) at. Just create a spreadsheet where a row or column does the same operation to a set of numbers. Here's an example Google Doc that does what you want - just enter the numbers you want to change on the left, and the number you want to change by in cell B1. You could even use that spreadsheet by going to File -> Make a copy or File > Download as.
posted by Tehhund at 11:01 AM on February 13, 2015