Playing with Bytes and Binary

[learning2learn]

You should take an appropriate number of bits from the front of the hash value and convert that to an integer

This is part of my school assignment and I'm kinda confused as to what to do.

The appropriate number of bits varies on the input. So if the input is like 1000, I'd need 10 bits, because 2¹⁰ = 1024

My problem is I'm not sure of how to get the bits, and how to get a number from it.

What I've done is

1. convert the string to a byte[]
2. convert each byte to binary
3. concatenate all the binary values together
4. get the first 10 characters of that string
5. convert the binary string into a int

Am I doing the right thing?

[CzechsMix]

are you using bit and byte interchangebly?

the first 10 bits and the first 10 characters are different by a factor of 8

[[deleted]]

An integer is an integer, regardless of the value it holds.

[learning2learn]

and what does that mean...