Hello everyone. For my aforementioned encryption program, I was rather hoping to use Sun's BigInteger implemention. It has a constructor that can accept arrays of bytes, and a method to return an array of bytes.
I could take an egotistical American view of the world, and cast chars into bytes -- but people in other countries might not be so fond of this plan. And now, my first question -- can anyone think of a better method than casting chars to ints, and using casting and shifting turning each int into four bytes? I imagine this would be slow, slow, slow. All the bits are lined up so prettily already, the casting and shifting mangles things badly. Also, if "int" ever grows in length from four bytes, my program might cease to function. Hehe. This also wastes two bytes per char. I could do more magic to fit two chars per int, I suppose... My second question -- some of the methods (such as String.getBytes(String enc)) take an encoding method -- and I haven't found documentation on these guys anywhere. I imagine "ascii" "ebcdic" "unicode" would be the names of encoding methods I could choose from, but I haven't found any uses of them yet. Pointers to resources would be much appreciated. :) They say the VM will use whatever is native on the system if the programmer doesn't specify, so I figure I should specify. Am I wrong on this point too? Thanks everyone. -- Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ Hate spam? See http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for help
