RSA encryption

I am developing a program that uses the RSA encryption algorithm to encrypt user input. I currently read the user input into a character array and then run through the array and convert from a letter to a number. I then pad the rest of the array with random numbers. The part I am struggling with is using this array to create a number (all the array elements concatenated) which I will use in the encryption. Any suggestions? I think I could just right the numbers to a file (or maybe the command line) and then read the resulting number back in. This seems somewhat circuitous - is there a faster/easier way?

I am still learning C so maybe I just need to know some special function. Has anyone developed and RSA program?

On a side note, has anyone here done anything with elliptic curve cryptography?

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Originally Posted by waterborne

On a side note, has anyone here done anything with elliptic curve cryptography?

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NSA has, the general consensus in the community is that it doesn't increase the level of security versus modular arithmetic on a processing requirement basis, i.e. for a given number of OPS, modular methods give better security than elliptic curves by simply using a larger key size.