Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The BigInteger Structure in ASP.NET4.0

The BigInteger Structure



Under some circumstances the standard integer data types provided by the .NET framework provide a range of values that is restrictive. The BigInteger structure, introduced in version 4.0 of the framework, removes the size limits.

What is a BigInteger?



The .NET framework version 4.0 introduced a new structure named BigInteger. This structure allows integer values of any size to be represented, unlike the previous integer types that had a fixed range of allowable values. BigIntegers allows you to store and process very large values without the risk of overflow exceptions and without considering the use of checked or unchecked arithmetic in most situations. These improvements do come with some limitations however, as it is not always as easy to work with BigIntegers as it is with the earlier types.



In this article we will see some examples of the use of BigInteger values and the operators, methods and properties of the new structure. To follow the examples, create a new console application. The BigInteger type is found in the System.Numerics.dll assembly, so add a reference to the assembly to your project. Finally, the structure is found in the System.Numerics namespace, so add the following using directive to your code file:

using System.Numerics;

Creating a BigInteger



Instantiating a BigInteger is easy when you wish to initialise it with a value that is within the range of one of the previously available numeric data types. For example, we can create a new BigInteger and apply an integer value to it using the assignment operator as follows:

BigInteger big = 1000000;



The above statement works because the integer types allow implicit casting to BigInteger. We can also instantiate a new BigInteger using the default constructor for the type. In this case the new value will be zero:

BigInteger big = new BigInteger(); // 0



Many other BigInteger constructors exist. Most include a single parameter that is used to initialise the new value. You can pass a 32-bit or 64-bit integer or unsigned integer or a double to the argument. For example, the next line of code initialises a BigInteger with the maximum value that can be assigned to an unsigned 64-bit integer.

BigInteger big = new BigInteger(ulong.MaxValue); // 18446744073709551615



The three methods describe above can only be used to create BigIntegers with values the lie within the range of one of the types available in earlier versions of the .NET framework. This limitation exists because you cannot define a BigInteger literal in C#. If you wish to initialise a variable with a larger value, you can use the final overloaded version of the constructor. This has a single parameter that accepts an array of bytes. The array represents a standard value using little endian byte order, meaning the least significant byte is the first element in the sequence.

BigInteger big = new BigInteger(new byte[] { 0, 0, 16, 99, 45, 94, 199, 107, 5 }); // 100000000000000000000



The last method of initialising a BigInteger is to parse a value from a string. This is particularly useful when the value is to be entered by the user. As with other numeric types, the BigInteger structure supports the use of Parse and TryParse to attempt to convert a string to a value. These methods can be used with specified number styles if required. The following simple example uses Parse with default options.

BigInteger big = BigInteger.Parse("100000000000000000000");



Source :-  http://www.blackwasp.co.uk/BigInteger.aspx

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