Distribute 'items' in buckets equally (best effort)

Question

Say I want to distribute y items to x buckets evenly. If x is a multiple of y this distribution will be even, if not I can end up with 0 items in each bucket. For ex:

For ex: I have 3 buckets and I want to distribute 2 items each. Since doing the division (2/3) will lead to 0 items per bucket. How can I achieve, a distribution of 1, 1, 0?

Answer 1

This type of thinking should work:

package sandbox;

public class Sandbox
{

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        int numBuckets = 12;
        int numItems = 34;

        int itemsPerBucket = (numItems / numBuckets);
        int remainingItems = (numItems % numBuckets);

        for (int i = 1; i <= numBuckets; i++)
        {
            int extra = (i <= remainingItems) ? 1:0;
            System.out.println("bucket " + i + " contains " + (itemsPerBucket + extra) + " items.");
        }
    }
}

The output of this:

bucket 1 contains 3 items.
bucket 2 contains 3 items.
bucket 3 contains 3 items.
bucket 4 contains 3 items.
bucket 5 contains 3 items.
bucket 6 contains 3 items.
bucket 7 contains 3 items.
bucket 8 contains 3 items.
bucket 9 contains 3 items.
bucket 10 contains 3 items.
bucket 11 contains 2 items.
bucket 12 contains 2 items.

Notice the only looping you do is to talk about each bucket. You can easily just ask a bucket number and see how many items are in it without loop!