read a large prime number(which is in hexadecimal form) from a file and store that in a global variable(integer form)

I was trying to read a large prime number(which is in hexadecimal form) from a file and store that in a global variable(integer form) in Matlab.

I tried using vpi() function but that gave me the followings

CODE:

hex2dec(tline)
num2str(hex2dec(tline))
prime=vpi(num2str(hex2dec(tline)));
disp('prime = ');

OUTPUT:

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC90FDAA22168C234C4C6628B80DC1CD129024E088A67CC74020BBEA63B139B22514A08798E3404DDEF9519B3CD3A431B302B0A6DF25F14374FE1356D6D51C245E485B576625E7EC6F44C42E9A63A3620FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

                         //reading the hexadecimal number
     192               //length of hexadecimal number

ans =                //hex2dec

    1.5525e+231

ans =               //num2str  ALL BITS AFTER 9 ROUNDED OFF TO ZERO

1552518092300708900000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

CAN ANYBODY TELL ME HOW CAN I GET THE EXACT NUMBER AND USE THAT AS A GLOBAL VARIABLE.

Answer 1

[Christopher Berry]

Anil,

Your prime number is a 192 character hexadecimal number, so that is roughly 2^768 in size. This is much bigger than the maximum integer MATLAB can store 18446744073709551615. You can check this by typing:

intmax('uint64')

Also, it is bigger than the integer precision of IEEE 754 double variables, which is 2^53. This explains why you are seeing rounding errors when converting it to a double.

To work with numbers on this scale in MATLAB, you can use the Symbolic Math toolbox. Specifically, MuPad has a function text2int which will do exactly what you want, convert from hexadecimal to decimal, but keep the results in symbolic form rather than numeric: The documentation for this function is here:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/symbolic/mupad_ref/text2int.html

To get this result into the base MATLAB workspace, you can use evalin with the symengine argument. To avoid quoting issues, use sprintf to create the expression to be evaluated as follows (notice the double quotes around %s):

>> str = sprintf('text2int("%s",16)','FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC90FDAA22168C234C4C6628B80DC1CD129024E088A67CC74020BBEA63B139B22514A08798E3404DDEF9519B3CD3A431B302B0A6DF25F14374FE1356D6D51C245E485B576625E7EC6F44C42E9A63A3620FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF')

s = evalin(symengine,str)

which return s in decimal as a sym

s =
1552518092300708935130918131258481755631334049434514313202351194902966239949102107258669453876591642442910007680288864229150803718918046342632727613031282983744380820890196288509170691316593175367469551763119843371637221007210577919