Working with hex numbers in MySQL

Question

I have a stored procedure that needs to convert hexadecimal numbers to their decimal equivalent. I've read the documentation for the UNHEX() function, but it is returning a binary value. What I'm wanting to do is something like this:

CREATE PROCEDURE foo( hex_val VARCHAR(10) )
BEGIN
    DECLARE dec_val INTEGER;

    SET dec_val = UNHEX( hex_val );

    -- Do something with the decimal value
    select dec_val;
END

What am I missing? How can I convert the UNHEX()'d value to a unsigned integer?

Answer 1

conv(hex_val, 16, 10)

Will convert a number of base 16 to base 10. The UNHEX function does something completely different, it converts pairs of hex digits to characters.