Extracting a char from a string in java

Hi All,

I would imagine that this is fairly straight foward but what I am tryin to do is compare two strings and depending on the outcome change the value in one string to the character value in another string

This is the code I am trying

if (number[i].charAt(0) != node.charAt(0))
   {

    //Hope to replace node with the first char in number[i]

   node = number[i].substring(0);

   System.out.print(node);

   }

But for input such as 34 for number, when I print out node it is also 34. I have tired replace and changing the types to char arrays and then back again and it just falls over.

Any suggestions would be great.