Question

How can I store a hexadecimal number in a variable without it becoming a decimal?

Or do I have to store it as either a string or integer?

Answer 1

Integers in .NET are not stored as decimal, they are stored as binary in two’s complement representation. Both decimal and hexadecimal are just different ways of reoresenting the number in a more human-friendly way.

If you want to output a number as hexadecimal you can use the “x” or “X” format specifier with the ToString method (which output lower- and upper-case respectively) with an optional fixed number of characters specified as “n” where n is the number of characters.

Some examples of outputting an integer as hex:

Dim n as Integer = &HBEEF;
Console.WriteLine(n.ToString("x")) ' output in lower case, e.g. beef '
Console.WriteLine(n.ToString("X")) ' output in upper case, e.g. BEEF '
Console.WriteLine(n.ToString("X8")) ' upper case & 8 chars, e.g. 0000BEEF '