It is sometimes necessary to generate aribtrarily-long lists of sequential numbers outside of a context (programming, spreadsheet editing, the command-line, etc.) where it would normally be trivial to do so. This comes up often enough that I was motivated to make this generator, so perhaps it might also be useful for others.
A command-line is not always available, but a web browser usually is. And it is much easier to jump to a new URL than to fire up an entire spreadsheet program or write a throwaway script just to generate some numbers.
The other thing is that there could be quite a lot of numbers needed in a given list. If it were 10 or 20 it might of course be easier to just enter them manually, but if we're talking about 100 or more it no longer seems reasonable to do by hand.
Also, numbers may frequently need to be padded with zeros to a certain number of digits. This is absurdly simple, so long as it's not being done manually. But opening up a spreadsheet all the time for something so simple also seems wrong. This simple number generator solves that.
An online demo is available here.
Enter a number in the from and to fields and click on Generate Numbers.
Optionally, add a number of digits to pad with zeros in the Zero padding field and generate numbers as normal.
If the zero padding field is set to 0 or 1, no padding will be used. If it is set to 2, then each number in the sequence will be padded to two digits, and the sequence from 1-10 will look like this: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10. If it is set to 3, numbers will be padded to three digits, and the same sequence will look like this: 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010.
The numbers in the list can be separated by any string of characters (including newlines \n, tabs \t, commas, spaces, etc.) by adjusting the value in the Field separator box.
* Arbitrary field separators
- Prepend numbers to list
"Number generator" is part of the tiny tools series, a collection of small mobile-friendly JavaScript tools for performing common tasks in the browser.
Other tools for working with columns of data that might also be of interest:
- milligram CSS by @cjpatoilo, prototyped using dropin-minimal-css
- github-corners by @tholman
MIT.