Integer Division in C#

This tutorial will discuss the methods to perform integer division in C#.

Implement Integer Division in C#

Integer division is a fundamental property of C#. If we divide an integer variable with another integer variable, it returns another integer variable.

This property holds even when the numerator isn’t completely divisible by the denominator. This property of division in C# is demonstrated in the following code snippet.

int numerator = 14;
int denominator = 3;
float ans = numerator/ denominator;
Console.WriteLine(ans);

Output:

4

The output shows the result when we divide the integer 14 by integer 3 and store it inside a float variable. As we all know, our denominator doesn’t completely divide the numerator, and the answer should have been 4.66.

Although it seems like we’re losing a lot of data, integer division has advantages over the float and decimal division. The integer division is much faster and computationally efficient than other types of division.

Another thing to note here is that most real-world problems require integer division rather than float or decimal division. If there were no integer division, we’d have to manually round the floating-point values into an integer after float or decimal division.

This adds extra overhead to the already expensive and slow decimal division operation.

One example where integer division is required rather than floating-point or decimal division is number system conversion. In this, we have to compute the integer division along with the remainder for each digit.

Without integer division, first, we’d have to cast the floating-point division into an integer and then re-compute the remainder.

In the cases where we want the exact floating-point results of a division, we can use float division. To convert the previous integer division into float division, we’d have to change the data type of either the numerator or the denominator to float.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to carry out float division in C#.

float numerator = 14;
int denominator = 3;
float ans = numerator/ denominator;
Console.WriteLine(ans);

Output:

4.6666667

We changed the data type of numerator to float to perform float division in the above code. The following code snippet shows that we can achieve the same results by only changing the data type of denominator to float.

int numerator = 14;
float denominator = 3;
float ans = numerator/ denominator;
Console.WriteLine(ans);

Output:

4.6666667

The floating-point and decimal division operations are computationally expensive, but we don’t lose any useful information while performing them.