Find the closest in a list of numbers

Saturday, April 26th, 2014

For a while now I’ve been working on a core set of functionality that I include with every application. In fact, my applications extend a core app that contains a whole bunch of commonly used functionality – but that’s a whole other post.

I’d intended to blog about some of the components I’ve been writing as I go along, but as is so often the case I find myself moving onto new work before I’ve sat down to write about the last.

Today, I needed to pass a number to a function and return the closest number in a given list.
So for example, a list of ‘10,20,50,100,200,1000’ and a value of 42, should return 50.

It’s a simple requirement, but Google returned nothing & the mighty Ben Nadel hadn’t written a comprehensive post on how to do it along with speed tests and examples involving hot girls; so I wrote a function and added it to my ever increasing library.

As it’s small, I thought I’d share… in doing so, I realised I’ve not updated this site in way too long – so for this I apologise.

Here’s what I came up with – hopefully it’ll save someone a bit of time:

Filed under: CFKrypton, ColdFusion, Railo.