binary string with leading zeros issue

Question

I have a string which is converted in binary format but the binary conversion method removes it leading zero's and I am not sure how much leading zero's I should add in the start .It depends on the string my code is as follows

public static void encodeString(String str){
        byte[] bytes=str.getBytes();
        String binary = new BigInteger(bytes).toString(2);

    }

Answer 1

I understand that you are trying to preserve the 8-bits representation of each character of your input String. to do so, I used this method:

    public static String byteFormat(String src) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    for (int i = 0; i < src.length(); i++) {

        char chr = src.charAt(i);
        String format= String.format("%8s", Integer.toBinaryString(chr)).replace(' ', '0');
        sb.append(format);
    }
    return sb.toString();

}

and I tested it like this :

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    System.out.println(byteFormat("test"));
}

}

it outputs :
01110100011001010111001101110100