Printing the contents of memory

[hpteenagewizkid]

Hello all,

I've been working on learning C for some time, but one of things I just can't get my head around is the business of printing the contents of memory to the screen. I know it's probably something as simple as making a loop that will cycle through addresses from a start point to an end point, and then print the data using printf, but I just can't figure out how to express that in code.

I've look around, but can't find any examples to work from, all I found was a page on pointers and extracting the address of variables from "C By Example" (chapter 20).

As an example, say I wanted to print out a list of chars stored in memory from a given address, how would that be accomplished?

Thanks a lot, and sorry if this sounds like a stupid question. I searched the forums but couldn't find any similar questions asked before.

Cheers.

Hussein.

[swgh]

I do C++, but the same theroy applys in C. If you are talking about using memory addreesses, you need to use pointers. If you are unsure on how to use them, read a tutorial online to get the jist of it. A pointer is basicly a variable that contains a memory address.

#include <iostream>

using std::cout;
using std::endl;
using std::cin;

int main ( void )
{
   int num = 10;
   int *ptr = &num;  // get address of num

   cout << *ptr << endl;  // will print 10

   cin.get();

   return 0;
}

I applogise in advance if you already know this, but sombody else may have a more definate answer, using pointers is the prime key though

[maxorator]

Still, you can't just read the memory in many OS-s, because the OS protects the memory that isn't meant to be read by your program.

[jafet]

You could write your own memory device driver which would run under the system and have unrestricted access to process memory. Whether this seems like a blatantly stupid, unresourceful waste of time and effort is your choice to make.

[dwks]

I wrote my own program to examine memory under Windows. Windows generally doesn't care what memory you access, as long as it's relatively close to the memory you're supposed to access.

Out of curiousity, why do you want to do this? A debugger could do it for you, unless you want this feature to be present in your finished program.

[hpteenagewizkid]

Hi. firstly, I'm really sorry for not responding sooner. Most of you must think I'm simply one of those people that come along, beg for answers and then just disappear. In actual fact, I hadn't realised that I had my preferences set to not send e-mail notification, and hence, and because I'm partially sighted, I lost the thread in amongst the forums. Just found this now after about an hour of searching.

Anyway, thanks for the tips. I read up about pointers, and whereas I'm still having trouble getting my head around the fact that a pointer is basically just a signpost saying 'xxx is this way' and also getting to grips with the fact that sometimes you put an asterisk before the pointer (char *ptr) and sometimes you don't (ptr = filename) I do get the basic gist.

As for wy I wanted to know, there was a pretty big section on it in the books I was studying from, and also it seemed to be important if you wanted to read back portions of memory, say if a file had been saved there.

Sorry if this all sounds pretty pointless. I'm still learning C, and haven't yet got to the concepts surrounding saving and opening files. At this level, I'm still just creating data, storing it in memory and then accessing it from there, as opposed to actual saved files.

Thanks again for the help. i appreciate your patience with me.

Hussein.

[dwks]

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