Subtracting 48 is a quick but slightly confusing way of converting from a character to an integer. It so happens that the character code for each digit is 48 away from its numeric value.
See this table of ASCII values. (Java uses unicode, not ascii - strings are UTF-16 internally - but the values are valid in this specific case). So the character '0' has the value 48; the character '9' has the value 57.
Another way of doing this would be to take 1-character substrings of input
, then call Integer.parseInt()
on that string, converting "1" to 1, "2" to 2, etc.