How to convert decimal to hexadecimal in JavaScript

Question

How do you convert decimal values to their hexadecimal equivalent in JavaScript?

Answer 1

I'm doing conversion to hex string in a pretty large loop, so I tried several techniques in order to find the fastest one. My requirements were to have a fixed-length string as a result, and encode negative values properly (-1 => ff..f).

Simple .toString(16) didn't work for me since I needed negative values to be properly encoded. The following code is the quickest I've tested so far on 1-2 byte values (note that symbols defines the number of output symbols you want to get, that is for 4-byte integer it should be equal to 8):

var hex = ['0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'];
function getHexRepresentation(num, symbols) {
    var result = '';
    while (symbols--) {
        result = hex[num & 0xF] + result;
        num >>= 4;
    }
    return result;
}

It performs faster than .toString(16) on 1-2 byte numbers and slower on larger numbers (when symbols >= 6), but still should outperform methods that encode negative values properly.