How to save a number as bytes16 in a smart contract and retrieve the number in javascript?

Question

I have the following smart contract to clarify the issue.

pragma solidity ^0.4.17;

contract Test {
    bytes16 number;

    function getNumber() public view returns(bytes16) {
        return number;
    }

    function setNumber(bytes16 _number) public {
        number = _number;
    }
}

So using javascript I convert a number to hex string like so let hex = ‘0x’ + (3456).toString(16) where hex is 0xd80. Then I pass the value as an argument to setNumber. The challenge is when I call getNumber what I receive in return is  0x0d800000000000000000000000000000. Like 28 zeroes is appended to the end. Parsing this gives a wrong value. I parse like so let num = parseInt(‘0x0d800000000000000000000000000000’, 16). And I get 1.7944577943096364e+37. How can one get the right value from this ‘0x0d800000000000000000000000000000’ or how to save the number as bytes16 without the extra zero digits.

Answer 1

You need to left pad it. When you pass 0xd80, it is getting right padded as part of the encoding process (to take up 16 bytes).

let argument = "0x" + web3.padLeft("d80", 32);

This should give you 0x00000000000000000000000000000D80