writing wrong bytes

Well, I have a strange problem with files. Basically what I'm trying to do is open 2 24-bit bmp files, compare their pixels, and write back out the pixels that remain the same and yellow pixels where they differ. This worked perfectly fine when I streamed the two files, but now I want to load the first file entirely into memory, and stream the second file. So I wrote the code to do this, and ran it, and oddly enough, a couple of the pixels wound up as strange offshoots of their original pixel, usually replacing one of the 3 color channels with 255. I suspect this to be a problem with overwriting memory, but can't for the life of me figure it out.

Here's my code:

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>

//RGB pixel structure
typedef struct {
 unsigned char c[3];
} tCol;

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
 FILE *f1, *f2, *t;
 tCol c1[480000], c2;
 unsigned char b[54];
 int n, s;
 f1 = fopen(argv[1],"rb");
 f2 = fopen(argv[2],"rb");
 t = fopen(argv[3],"wb");

 //skip header information
 fseek(f2,54,SEEK_SET);
 fread(b,54,1,f1);
 fwrite(b,54,1,t);

 s = fread(c1,3,480000,f1); //read file1 into buffer
 n = 0;
 while (fread(c2.c,3,1,f2) > 0) { //read file2 in pixel at a time
  if ((c1[n].c[0] != c2.c[0]) || (c1[n].c[1] != c2.c[1]) || (c1[n].c[2] != c2.c[2])) { //if pixel differs
  c1[n].c[0] = 0; //overwrite pixel in buffer with yellow
  c1[n].c[1] = 255;
  c1[n].c[2] = 255;
  }
  n++;
 }
 fwrite(c1,3,s,t); //flush buffer to file

 //if not an even 32 bits, add 0's to make it
 b[0] = 0;
 b[1] = 0;
 b[2] = 0;
 fwrite(b,s &#37; 4,1,t);

 fclose(t);
 fclose(f1);
 fclose(f2);
}

---

The images will never exceed 800x600, thus why I have hard coded in 480000.

The image turns out perfect for an 800x600 image, but when I plug in a 54x32 image, a few pixels will suddenly go green, red, purple, blue, or teal when they're not supposed to, and usually they are to the left and right of or on an area that was supposed to turn yellow.

> tCol c1[480000], c2[0];
For c2 that should be:

Code:

---

tCol c2[1];

---

But there's no reason for c2 to be an array, so:

Code:

---

tCol c2;

---

would suffice.

And you might also have a problem with padding.

Code:

---

>typedef struct {
> unsigned char c[3];
>} tCol;

---

The compiler could add padding to the end of this struct. Print out sizeof(tCol). If it does not print 3, then you have a problem.

Not sure how that got to be 0, it used to be 1. I made it an array because it was complaining when I was trying to read it in from the file. But I made it stop complaining now so I can correct that.

printf("%i\n",sizeof(tCol));
prints out 3 wherever I try it.

The problem of the wrong bytes, though, still persists.

> but when I plug in a 54x32 image
54 (the number of pixels in a row) * 3 (the number of bytes in a pixel) = 162
This is not a multiple of 4

Each row of a BMP is 4-byte aligned, which means there is two bytes at the end of each row you need to skip.

Each row? Well that explains it. I thought it was just at the end of the file.
Thanks. Guess I'll have to read the header information after all.

If you need more information about the BMP format, search wotsit.org.