Java charAt method returning values not even part of the string

Question

I am working on a radix sort lab for my college computer science B course but I keep running into an error. I need to get the value of a digit in a certain spot so to do that I converted the number into a string and used user charAt(2) to get the ones digit of 587. However, charAt is returning 55 which makes no sense and then I get an index out of bounds error because the number is supposed to be one digit from 0-9. the method takes the head of a linkedList, removes it from the linked list and then takes the removed node and adds it into a bucket.

  String s = null;
  String val;


    for(int i = 0; i <count;i++){

     int temp = (Integer)tempNode.getValue();

     val = temp+"";

     int dval = (int) val.charAt(mod);

     tempNode =(name.removeFirst(s));

     bucket[dval].addToEnd(tempNode);
     tempNode = name.getHead();

 }

Answer 1

What you're doing with (int) val.charAt(mod) is getting the ascii value of the character, see this which is indeed 55 for the character 7. What you want is Character.getNumericValue() to get the numeric value of this character.

String str = "7";

System.out.println((int) str.charAt(0)); // Prints 55
System.out.println(Character.getNumericValue(str.charAt(0))); // Prints 7