How do I convert an alpha character from a text string to its decimal value

Question

I am trying to find out the actual decimal value of a character in a string. So far the code below is as far as I got. I am able to get what I guess is a byte value.
This is for a school assignment:
The idea behind what I am trying to do is to design a hash function to store dictionary words into a bucket array hash table, without using the existing Hashtable.class
so far this is what I can come up with to get some kind of value for each character in the string, however, what I am trying to get is the decimal value for each character.
public static void main(String args[]){
     String word = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
     for (int i=0 ; i < word.length(); i++){
     System.out.print((word.substring(i,i+1)));
     System.out.print("\t : "+((word.substring(i,i+1))).getBytes());
Thankyou for any replies.

Answer 1

I'm not sure I completly understand your goal- what you mean by "decimal value", but, if you simply want to find the byte value of each character in a String, you would probably be better off using getBytes() in a way like this,
byte [] bytes = string.getBytes();
Then, if you need to map that to a charcter, you could use a for loop like
for (int x = 0; x < bytes.length; x++) {
table.put((char)bytes[x], bytes[x]);
which assummes this bucket class of yours allows primitive data types like so (in Hashtable or HashMap, you would have to use a wrapper Object). I guess, my point reduces to, don't use substring and string search methods (like indexOf()), unless you have to because they are more expensive then just maping the array of bytes and chars, which seems to be what you are interested in doing.