XOR Hex-Encoded Strings in Scala

It's been said that all cryptographers do is XOR things together. Although that's not entirely true, we do find ourselves XORing things quite a bit... maybe there is some truth to that after all. Anyway, the other day, while I was writing a two-time pad attack on stream ciphers, I needed a few utility methods to make the string operations a bit easier. One of the methods was performing XOR operations on two hex-encoded strings. Here's the utility method in Scala. I posted it here in case anybody else might find it useful.

def xorHexStrings(hexString1 : String, hexString2 : String) = {
    val iterator1 = hexString1.sliding(2, 2)
    val iterator2 = hexString2.sliding(2, 2)
    val result =  new StringBuilder
        
    if (hexString2.length > hexString1.length) {
        while (iterator1.hasNext) {
            val i = Integer.toString(Integer.parseInt(iterator1.next, 16) ^
                    Integer.parseInt(iterator2.next, 16), 16)

            if (i.length == 1) result.append("0")
            result.append(i)

        }
            
        while (iterator2.hasNext) result.append(iterator2.next)
    }
    else {
        while (iterator2.hasNext) {
            val i = Integer.toString(Integer.parseInt(iterator1.next, 16) ^
                    Integer.parseInt(iterator2.next, 16), 16)

            if (i.length == 1) result.append("0")
            result.append(i)

        }
          
        while (iterator1.hasNext) result.append(iterator1.next)
    }
        
    result.toString()
}

If we call this method within our main function, we can see the results.

def main(args : Array[String]) {
    val hexString1 = "1274560603"
    val hexString2 = "876429"

    //prints 95107f0603
    println(xorHexStrings(hexString1, hexString2))
}