Thread: can copy directly???

I'm not sure longs are necessarily all 4 bytes... however, I managed to make this work:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void) {
   unsigned __int32 foo;
   unsigned char bar[4] = { 0xFF, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00 }; 
   memcpy(&foo,bar,4);
   
   printf("%u",foo);
   return 0;
}

The output for me was 255... the first thing you should notice about that is the bytes are(or may be) in the reverse order than you might expect. I'd suppose this has to do with the endian of my computer. You can probably fix this by making sure you convert the byte order with one of the socket functions like htonl(). Other than that, it seems to work fine. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some other quirks I don't notice here... I also wouldn't be surprised if the output was different on your computer. Someone will be able to enlighten you further.

Here's another neat not-quite-standard trick:

Code:

union foo
{
  unsigned char check_sum[4];
  unsigned long sum;
};

And then you can set check_sum to whatever you need and retrieve it as a long using sum.

While we're using non-standard tricks . . . I think this would work:

Code:

*(unsigned long *)check_sum

I don't know how you got an array like this in the first place.

Code:

unsigned char check_sum[4];

If you read it in from a file, you could use fread().