Posted on November 11th, 2005

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Interesting little trick I came across today. I had a list of values that looked like:

Compare time: 0.109375s
Compare time: 0.015625s
Compare time: 0.03125s
Compare time: 0.015625s
Compare time: 0.03125s
Compare time: 0.015625s

I wanted to add up all the values, and didn’t have access to a Linux box (where I could just run awk in a while loop), nor do I have Python installed on here.

So, I opened up the list in notepad, replaced all the “Compare time: ” with an empty string. Then, something told me to try replacing the trailing “s” with a plus sign, and pasting it into the windows Calculator window. I tried it with just the first two:

0.109375+
0.015625

and sure enough, it worked. So I copied the entire list, and pasted it into the Calculator window, and viola! I had my answer. For once, a nice surprise in a GUI!

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One Response to “Adding up a list of numbers using Calculator”

1. Ian says:

   November 14, 2005 at 7:11 am

   And just to balance out the light and dark sides, the same experiment in PowerToy Calculator gives…
   0.109375+
   ERROR:Unknown characters occurred []