Characters in String : Unicode 16-bit to custom 32-bit

Question

I understand that internally in Java, characters in Strings are actually Unicode characters, with each character represented with 16 bits.
So, character �L� in Unicode is 0x004C
which is also 0000 0000 0100 1100
Now, I wish to encode each of the 4 bits above into individual ASCII characters:
= 0 0 4 C
= 0x30 0x30 0x34 0x43
= 00110000 00110000 00110100 01000011
So, from the original 16-bit character in Java, I want a final 32-bit.
Eventually, I�ll need to send the final result over the network, via OutputStream/writer and socket.
Can someone help me on this ? Or give me some ideas... Thanks.

Answer 1

trick: prepend the number with 1 and use substring... like int charWith1 = c + 0x10000. That'll make charWith1 to be of the format 0x1XXXX. Then call hexstring on that, you get a string like "1XXXX." Then you can drop the 1 with a call to substring.
of course there are methods that use only bit operations and additions to do it, making it a bit faster.. like this:
byte byte0 = (byte) ((c & 0x000F) + '0');
byte byte1 = (byte) (((c & 0x00F0) >> 4) + '0');
...