Convert string to number & vice versa complexity

Question

What would be the complexity of converting a string to its equivalent number or vice versa? Does it change depending on programming language?

On the face of it, one ne

Answer 1

Numeric strings are numbers formatted in positional notation - so the value of each digit multiplied by a power of the base needs to be taken into account in order to convert the number into a binary format.

So yeah, it's an O(N) operation because the running time increases linearly as more digits are added. However, in practice N may be limited by whatever numeric data-types the language supports (e.g. int32_t, int64_t). But if arbitrary precision number types are used (which some languages, like Python, use by default) then there is no limit to the number of digits (other than available memory obviously).