Question

All-
I am having a hard time taking the value of an EditText and messing with it to preform equations and tasks like rounding and multiplying. I have heard that BigDecimal is a good way to do this but it was very difficult to get the variables to a type where they could become BigDecimal variables (View->String->Float->BigDecimal) and then to get them to a type where they could be outputted (BigDecimal->?).
Here is my code:

 public class TippingActivity extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
    public void calculateNumbers(View view) throws ParseException {
        // Bill
        EditText text = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.edit_bill);             
        String value;
        value = text.getText().toString();
        float bill = Float.parseFloat(value);       
        BigDecimal billbd;
        billbd = new BigDecimal(bill);


        //Tip
        EditText text2 = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.edit_tip);
        String value2;
        value2 = text2.getText().toString();    
        if(!value2.contains("."))
            value2 = "."+value2;
        float tip = Float.parseFloat(value2);
        BigDecimal tipbd;
        tipbd = new BigDecimal(tip);

        //People
        EditText text3 = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.edit_people);
        String value3;
        value3 = text3.getText().toString();
        float people = Float.parseFloat(value3);
        BigDecimal peoplebd;
        peoplebd = new BigDecimal(people);
        //Answer
        TextView answer = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.answer);
        //Answer to string
        String answerstring;
        answerstring = answer.getText().toString();
        //Answer to Float
        float answerfloat = Float.parseFloat(answerstring);
        //Answer to BigDecimal
        BigDecimal answerbig;
        answerbig = new BigDecimal(answerfloat);
        answerbig.setScale(2, RoundingMode.HALF_UP);
        answerbig = billbd.multiply(tipbd).add(billbd).divide(peoplebd);
        //Answer to String
        String answerfrombd = answerbig.getText().toString();        
        answer.setText(answerfrombd);       
    }
}

In the second line of code from the bottom I get an error on

`String answerfrombd = answerbig.getText().toString();`

because I can’t go from BigDecimal to String. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can do, depending how you want it to display.

answerbig.toPlainString() 

or:

answerbig.toBigInteger().toString()