Loop converting to hex - please help

[coco861541]

Could someone please explain to me what the following code exactly does?


for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
if ((digest & 0xFF) < 0x10) hexValue += "0";
hexValue += Integer.toHexString(digest & 0xFF);


I have a program which calculates MD5 hashes from websites to determine whether they have changed since the last visit, and this snippet is part of my source code. I need to know what exactly this code is doing.

Thanks

[evlich]

So, what you wrote wasn't exactly complete, at least I hope that it wasn't.

for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
  if ((digest & 0xFF) < 0x10) hexValue += "0";
  hexValue += Integer.toHexString(digest & 0xFF);

What this does is print the byte representation of the variable digest 16 times. Essentially it does this:

for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
  hexValue += Integer.toHexString(digest & 0xFF);

but it prepends a '0' if the result of Integer.toHexString will be only 1 digit.
For example:
0x55 => "55"
0x04 => "04" (instead of just "4", which is what it would be without the if statement)

I would guess that digest is looping over the first 16 bytes of the file, or 16 random bytes in the file, whichever. Basically on each iteration of the loop it appends the 2 digit hex representation of digest to the end of the hexValue string.

Hope this helps.

[coco861541]

oops, it is supposed to read

"digest[i] & 0xFF"

not just "digest & 0xFF"

my fault i didnt proofread. many thanks for the reply, its a shame i had this code in my program and i didnt really understand what it did