Fun With Fizz Buzz

On Twitter last night I noticed someone mention that they were "having fun with #FizzBuzz". I had never heard of Fizz Buzz before, so I decided to look it up. In short, Fizz Buzz is a simple programming task that any competent programmer should be able to accomplish. The task is to print numbers from 1 to 100, delimited by a comma and space. For each number divisible by 3 you print "Fizz" instead of the number, for each number divisible by 5 you print out "Buzz", and for each number divisible by both 3 and 5 you print out "FizzBuzz". The apparent simplicity and hidden complexity of this problem also makes it popular in programming interviews. I like a good brain teaser, so down the rabbit hole I went. My only ground rule was no help from the Internet.

My first instinct was to keep it simple:

Console.Write("1");
for(int i = 2 ; i < 101 ; i++)
{
	Console.Write(", ");
	if(i % 3 == 0 && i % 5 == 0)
	{
		Console.Write("FizzBuzz");
	}
	else if(i % 3 == 0)
	{
		Console.Write("Fizz");
	}
	else if(i % 5 == 0)
	{
		Console.Write("Buzz");
	}
	else
	{
		Console.Write(i);
	}
}

It gets the job done, but man that is not elegant at all. And it's long. And it has redundancy in the combined "FizzBuzz". Not a good solution at all. Let's see if I can't simplify this a little bit:

Console.Write("1");
for(int i = 2 ; i < 101 ; i++)
{
	string output = ", ";
	if(i % 3 == 0)
	{
		output += "Fizz";
	}
	if(i % 5 == 0)
	{
		output += "Buzz";
	}
	if(output.Length == 2)
	{
		output += i;
	}
	Console.Write(output);
}

That's a little bit better. It's not much shorter, but it does refactor out the redundancy which would be good maintenance-wise if the text ever had to change. It's also using the string length as a flag to indicate if the number should be output or not. For my next try, I wondered if caching the content would help:

string[] output = new string[100];
output = output.Select((o, i) => (i + 1) % 3 == 0 ? "Fizz" : string.Empty).ToArray();
output = output.Select((o, i) => (i + 1) % 5 == 0 ? o + "Buzz" : o).ToArray();
output = output.Select((o, i) => o.Length == 0 ? (i + 1).ToString() : o).ToArray();
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", output));

Now that's looking a little more concise! This attempt is basically the same as the one before except the conditions are collapsed into repeated iterations over a cache using a ternary operator (which can make for really unreadable code if you're not careful). I think it's debatable if it actually enhances readability, but at this point I'm going for innovation over maintainability. I do like how using string.Join() eliminates worrying about proper delimiter placement. To that end, I figured I'd try getting the whole thing down to a single statement:

Console.Write(string.Join(", ", 
    Enumerable.Range(1, 100).Select(i => 
        i % 15 == 0 ? "FizzBuzz" : 
            (i % 3 == 0 ? "Fizz" : 
                (i % 5 == 0 ? "Buzz" : i.ToString())
            )
    )));

And there you have it, a single-statement Fizz Buzz thanks to excessive use of the ternary operator! The redundancy has also crept back in, but hey, that's the least of the maintenance problems with this code.

Have I missed any other cool strategies?