Question

I converted a String to BigInteger as follows:

Scanner sc=new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("enter the message");
String msg=sc.next();
byte[] bytemsg=msg.getBytes();
BigInteger m=new BigInteger(bytemsg); 

Now I want my string back. I’m using m.toString() but that’s giving me the desired result.

Why? Where is the bug and what can I do about it?

Answer 1

You want to use BigInteger.toByteArray()

String msg = "Hello there!";
BigInteger bi = new BigInteger(msg.getBytes());
System.out.println(new String(bi.toByteArray())); // prints "Hello there!"

The way I understand it is that you’re doing the following transformations:

  String  -----------------> byte[] ------------------> BigInteger
          String.getBytes()         BigInteger(byte[])

And you want the reverse:

  BigInteger ------------------------> byte[] ------------------> String
             BigInteger.toByteArray()          String(byte[])

Note that you probably want to use overloads of String.getBytes() and String(byte[]) that specifies an explicit encoding, otherwise you may run into encoding issues.