Casting an array of chars to ints on a hashtable

Question

This is a question regarding casting of types in Java.

public int hashFunction(String D){
    char[] Thing = D.toCharArray();
    for(int i=0; i < Thing.length; i++){
        index =+(int)Thing.length;
    }
    return index % tablesize;
}

Now how does the code work such that each content of the char array is now cast to a type int ?

Answer 1

Java will allow you to assign char s to int s, since int has a larger domain than char . This is known as widening :

char c = 'a';
int i = c; // compiles just fine

You probably want to access each element in Thing , right? Use an enhanced for loop:

for(char c : Thing) {
  // do something with c
}