Given a total, determine how many times a value will go into it

Question

The Problem:

A box can hold 53 items. If a person has 56 items, it will require 2 boxes to hold them. Box 1 will hold 53 items and box 2 will hold 3.

How do I repeat the above where 53 is a constant, unchanging, value and 56 is a variable for each box:

Math.Ceiling(Convert.ToDecimal(intFeet / 53))

what I have so far for that is:

int TotalItems = 56; 
int Boxes = Math.Ceiling(Convert.ToDecimal(intFeet / 53));  

for (int i = 0; i < Boxes; i++)
{  
    int itemsincurrentbox=??  
}  

Answer 1

Where the integers capacity and numItems are your box capacity (53 in the example) and the total number of items you have, use the following two calculations:

int numBoxes = numItems / capacity;
int remainder = numItems % capacity;

This will give you the number of boxes that are filled (numBoxes), and the number of items in an additional box (remainder) if any are needed, since this value could be 0.

Edit: As Luke pointed out in the comments, you can get the same result with the .NET class library function Math.DivRem.

int remainder;
int numBoxes = Math.DivRem( numItems, capacity, out remainder );

This function returns the quotient and puts the remainder in an output parameter.

Answer 2

simple, overly imperative example:

int itemsPerBox = 53;
int totalItems = 56;
int remainder = 0;
int boxes = Math.DivRem(totalItems, itemsPerBox, out remainder);
for(int i = 0; i <= boxes; i++){
    int itemsincurrentbox = i == boxes ? remainder : itemsPerBox;
}