In Java, how do I convert a byte array to a string of hex digits while keeping leading zeros? [duplicate]

Answer 1

byte messageDigest[] = algorithm.digest();
StringBuffer hexString = new StringBuffer();
for (int i = 0; i < messageDigest.length; i++) {
    String hexByte = Integer.toHexString(0xFF & messageDigest[i]);
    int numDigits = 2 - hexByte.length();
    while (numDigits-- > 0) {
        hexString.append('0');
    }
    hexString.append(hexByte);
}

Answer 2

In order to keep leading zeroes, here is a small variation on what has Paul suggested (eg md5 hash):

public static String MD5hash(String text) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
    byte[] hash = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5").digest(text.getBytes());
    return String.format("%032x",new BigInteger(1, hash));
}

Oops, this looks poorer than what's Ayman proposed, sorry for that

Answer 3

Check out Hex.encodeHexString from Apache Commons Codec.

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Hex;

String hex = Hex.encodeHexString(bytes);

Answer 4

It appears concat and append functions can be really slow. The following was MUCH faster for me (than my previous post). Changing to a char array in building the output was the key factor to speed it up. I have not compared to Hex.encodeHex suggested by Brandon DuRette.

public static String toHexString(byte[] bytes) {
    char[] hexArray = {'0','1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','A','B','C','D','E','F'};
    char[] hexChars = new char[10000000];
    int c = 0;
    int v;
    for ( j = 0; j < bytes.length; j++ ) {
        v = bytes[j] & 0xFF;
        hexChars[c] = hexArray[v/16];
        c++;
        hexChars[c] = hexArray[v%16];
        c++;
    }
    return new String(hexChars, 0, c); }