Character Patterns
Finally my first tutorial! I hope it gets accepted.
This happens to be a problem asked in almost every introductory course in every language. This tutorial aims to help you go about creating all those patterns.

Prerequisites: You’ll need to be thorough with loops, nested loops and If – Then….Else …, and other similar constructs, arrays and functions. You also need to know about some of VB’s intrinsic functions namely Val(), Space() and String().

Let’s start with a simple problem of creating a pattern like this.



Also suppose that the number of rows can be specified by the user.

To start, create a standard EXE project in VB6 while in .NET create a Windows Application.

Put a command button. This will be used to generate the pattern required.

Now, to write your program, you’ll have to decide what variables you’re going to use. Pretty simple, you need one for holding the number of rows and another for the loop. Put the following code in the button’s click event (The following works for VB6. .NET code is given later. Only a few modifications are required):



Now you need to know the number of rows:

And now comes the important part. To write the code, remember that a particular sequence follows for ‘n’ rows. Each row is printed like this:
Print <certain_number_of_spaces> + <i number of *>
Notice that the number of spaces is the total number of rows minus the current row. This repeats for every row. So your Print statement should be


That finishes it. Your entire code should look like this:


Now run the program. Enter the number of rows when you click the button and check out the pattern.
To write the program in .NET, you’ll need a textbox. VB.NET does not have a print statement to print something on a form. So we’ll use a textbox. Add a textbox to your form and use the following code:


Another small variation in the problem is to print:

The key idea here is to use ASCII values of characters. Remember that the ASCII value of A is 65. The other letters follow in order. So change the print statement to:

Notice one thing. The pattern goes hay-wired after E. This is because Letters will have different widths. So you will see that questions don’t normally go above D.

You can also have:

which prints:

Try experimenting with more complicated patterns yourself!!

Pascal's Triangle
Now, lets move on to Pascal’s Triangle. It looks like this:

and so on……
There are two ways of finding each term. One is to find the coefficient with the formula:

C stands for combination (Permutations and Combinations).
The other way is that each term is got by adding the two numbers directly above it.

Let’s start with the first one since it’s somewhat straightforward (At least that’s what I’ve felt). You’ll need to know about functions for this.

Begin by creating a standard EXE in VB6 and a Windows application in .NET. Add a button.

We’ll need a function to calculate nCr. Let’s call it nCr. Since this function requires that you find a factorial, create one more function called factorial.

The code for each function would be:


and


That takes care of finding each term. Now all you need to worry about is arranging them. That’s easy since we do it the same way as we did for the ‘*’ pattern. So add the following last piece of code to finish off:

And that is all you require to do the work. Here’s the code posted together.


In .NET, you’ll have to use a textbox like before. With a few modifications, the code will look like this:


Now let’s move on to the other way of getting the triangle. As said before, the term required is equal to the sum of the two terms directly above it.
Let’s use two arrays: one to store the current row and the other to store the next row. All the declarations would go like this:


The two arrays are dynamic. We’ll need to change their size frequently. Also, apart from storing the required numbers in the row, I’ve used a leading and a trailing zero in each row. So row1 is stored as 010, row2 as 0110, row3 as 01210 and so on. This is done to make manipulations a little easier.
Next we ask for the number of rows and also define the initial dimensions of the array. The initial dimensions of CurrRow would be the number of elements in row1 while that of NextRow would be the number of elements in row2 (This includes the extra zeros). Also we’ll initialize the second element of CurrRow to 1. The other elements in both rows will be zero by default. So:


Now here’s the main section: Getting the element itself. Look at Pascal’s triangle again. Let’s take 3 rows for simplicity (with the zeros):

Row1: 010
Row2 0110
Row3 01210
Notice that the element of a particular row is got by adding the element of the previous row at the same column position with the element of the previous column position. So to get the required element of the “Next Row”:
<element of next row at column j> = <element of prev row at column j> + <element of prev row at position j-1>
We’ll also have to print this element. Hence the code required will be

All this needs to be in two loops: one to handle each row and the other for each element in the current row. The second loop is nested within the first. We also need to re-define the dimensions of the two arrays after a particular row has been taken care of. All of this condenses to:

The line

Basically makes the “next row”, the “current row” for your next iteration.
All this together is:


Similarly, in .NET the code would be (remember to add a textbox as before):


That’s it. Now run the program, enter the number of rows you want and see the results!

This post has been edited by Louisda16th: 1 Nov, 2007 - 10:41 AM

To the mod who accepted this! Thank you very much! I never thought my first tut would be accepted .

Very nice Louisda16th! And you included a VB6 and VB.Net example which will help many

Thanx for your compliments man .

Awesome work man! I just found one minor bug in the first one where you have For = 0 to n which would actually end up giving you one more row than the user asked for since for loops are inclusive it would count 0. So if you specified 6 it would actually execute 7 times and give you 7 rows. The second example with the arrays you start from 1 which does give you the correct number of rows.

Again, minor minor thing.

Great stuff though. Nice tutorial.



This post has been edited by Martyr2: 1 Nov, 2007 - 08:57 AM

My bad. Sorry. Thanks for the correction . I'll go ahead and change it.
EDIT:. Its actually from 0 to n-1. Not 1 to n. Basically I calculate 0C0 as well for the first row which is just a 1.

Changes Made

This post has been edited by Louisda16th: 1 Nov, 2007 - 10:44 AM

This has nothing to do with this tutorial but I think I'm going to make a C# version

That'll be great. I'll try writing one for C.

what the output of this code>?

whats the output of this code>?

I have shown what the output should be before I've gone into the code. Look for the triangular patterns of characters. Those are the outputs.

Is there something you want to ask?

There are a few places where you've forgotten to add ByVal to the second parameter.

Private Function nCr(ByVal n As Integer, r As Integer) As Long

should be

Private Function nCr(ByVal n As Integer, ByVal r As Integer) As Long

Isn't the ByVal default?

[font=Arial Narrow]
how i wish u could just post the whole codes.

Then you would just be copying and pasting, ie. not actually learning anything. Read it and understand why that piece of coding was used.

I thought the code was complete!!!

*double posted by mistake*

This post has been edited by Louisda16th: 14 Sep, 2009 - 04:25 AM

Yeah, actually after reading it carefully, you have actually posted the whole code.