Converting a decimal to BCD in Java

Converting a decimal to BCD in Java

Using Java, I need to convert a decimal to a packed BCD and back (packed BCD to Decimal), if possible, signed or unsigned. Can you help? I am hoping that there might be some open source software out here that I could work from. Would you know of any available open source that does this?

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My God, someone asking about BCD. Next it'll be how to solve polynomials with VAX microcode. It looks like there's no free code anywhere, as far as I can tell, except for a small example in C called Jon's BCD Clock. It does unsigned-to-BCD only.

Scratching my head, it sounds pretty simple though. A DECIMAL type is probably implemented (for you) as a BigDecimal. You can toString() that type. Once you've got a string, you're most of the way to BCD. Take each character, subtract "0" and stuff the result in a byte of a byte array. For signed numbers, that's a trickier proposition and depends on the packed format; I don't recall any signed BCD formats offhand.

This was first published in January 2005