Alphanumeric Series

Alpha-Numeric Series is a sequence of alphabets and numbers. It might also include lower-case and upper-case alphabets, punctuations and signs. Alphanumeric series is one of the most asked topics in competitive or government exams. There are a few types of questions that particularly come under this series such as:

• Coding-Decoding.
• Series based analysis.
• Finding positions.

Alphanumeric series reasoning is generally used in competitive exams to test reasoning, analysing, and problem-solving abilities.

Alphanumeric Series

Alphanumeric Series can be one of the trickiest questions one can come across because the way/pattern of alphabets, numbers, symbols and punctuations it has can confuse the person solving it so there are some do’ and don’t’ one should follow while solving the questions:

Do’s

• Separate all the characters and number them from left to right to have a clear picture of the series.
• Always read the question twice before solving or proceeding towards the steps.
• There might be similar alphabets, symbols, punctuations and numbers but always consider them separate.
• There might be upper-case and lower-case letters of the same number that must be treated separately.

Don’t

• Never be in a hurry while solving such questions because you might miss some characters.
• Never consider the lower case and upper-case alphabets as one.

Solved Examples

Let us solve some alphanumeric questions

5 / w D 6 a 2 W 9. 0 

Example 1: What will be the 8th character to the left of the character “.”?

Firstly, we will number all the characters separately.

Secondly, we will count 8 from “.” Towards left. Which will be “/”. Hence “/” is the 8th character from the left of “.”

Example 2: What will be the 5th character from the left of the 10th character from the beginning?

This is a very tricky question and people might get confused for once after reading this.

Firstly, Let’s find the 10th character from the beginning which will be “.” 

Now, Let’s find the 5th character from the left of “.” Which will be “6”

Hence the answer to this question is 6.

These were just a few basic alphanumeric questions from the Alphanumeric Series, let us now have a look at a few complicated ones.

Example 3: What will be the 6th from the left of “w” if the series is reversed?

Firstly, let us reverse the series in order to make it more comfortable for us.

9 W 2 a 6 w / 5

This is the new series now like previous examples. Let’s find the 6th character from the left of “w”.

The 6th character from the left of “w” will be “.”

Example 4: Replace 4th character with 1st character, 6th character with 3rd character, 8th character with 10th character and then find out the 8th character from the right.

Again, this is a complicated sum and we will have to make the table again to replace the characters.

As said in the sum we have to replace 4th character with 1st, 6th character with 3rd character, 8th character with 10th character. The new series will be:

D / a 5 6 w 2 . 9 W 0

Now the 8th character from the right is “5”.

Conclusion

Alpha Numeric is a very important and tricky topic that can come in competitive exams and can even confuse a lot of times; hence this topic is meant to be dealt with a lot of patience and confidence.