Java - Convert a String of letters to an int of corresponding ascii?

Question

I want to convert a String, lets say "abc", to an int with the corresponding ascii: in this example, 979899.

I've run into two problems:

1) what I wrote only works for characters whose ascii is two characters long and

2) since these numbers get very big, I can't use longs and I'm having trouble utilizing BigIntegers.

This is what I have so far:

BigInteger mInt = BigInteger.valueOf(0L);
for (int i = 0; i<mString.length(); i++) {
        mInt = mInt.add(BigInteger.valueOf(
                (long)(mString.charAt(i)*Math.pow(100,(mString.length()-1-i)))));
}

Any suggestions would be great, thanks!

Answer 1

What's wrong with doing all the concatenation first with a StringBuilder and then creating a BigInteger out of the result? This seems to be much simpler than what you're currently doing.

String str = "abc";  // or anything else

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (char c : str.toCharArray())
    sb.append((int)c);

BigInteger mInt = new BigInteger(sb.toString());
System.out.println(mInt);

Answer 2

you don't have to play the number game. (pow 100 etc). just get the number string, and pass to constructor.

final String s = "abc";
        String v = "";
        final char[] chars = s.toCharArray();
        for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
            v += String.valueOf((int) chars[i]);
        }
//v = "979899" now
        BigInteger bigInt = new BigInteger(v); //BigInteger
        BigDecimal bigDec = new BigDecimal(v); // or BigDecimal