Strings in Java are built from the char type, not byte, which unlike the other
integral types is unsigned.  You can use chars directly as numbers.
<http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/datatypes.html>

Because int is a wider type than char, you can assign a char to an int with an
implicit widening conversion.

char constants are delimited by single-quotes (apostrophe, or ' ), not
double-quotes.

If you want a single char out of a String you can use the String charAt() method.
<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#charAt(int)>

However, a single char might not contain an entire Unicode code point, due to
the use of surrogate pairs.  For that you'd use String codePointAt():
<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#codePointAt(int)>

If, as in your example, you just want to assign the first (or only) char of
String to an int, you can do something like

  int value = " ".charAt(0);

On Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:00:56 -0500, "Charles Albrecht"
<cwalbrec@sover.net> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

see http://mindprod.com/applet/converter.html

for all you conversion questions.
--

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com