How to display the bit pattern of a Structure variable in C which uses bit fields?

Question

    Struct some{
         unsigned int a:5;
         Unsigned int b:6;
    } std1;

Now let us have stored some values in std1. Now how can we display the bit pattern of the structure variable std1 in C?

Thank you for the immediate reply, can you please provid me the code for how to copy std1 to the union by assigning to the struct some member. — Arindam Kashyap
– Arindam Kashyap, Commented Nov 12, 2020 at 9:47
also i'm restricted to use any other header files then stdio.h,stdlib.h and malloc.h,so uint8_t* provide an error. thank you — Arindam Kashyap
– Arindam Kashyap, Commented Nov 12, 2020 at 9:50

Lundin · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-12 08:32:10Z

1

For any data type in C, you can inspect its raw binary contents by iterating over it using character type pointers. Example:

const uint8_t* ptr = (const uint8_t*)&std1;
for(size_t i=0; i<sizeof std1; i++)
{
  printf("%.2X ", (unsigned int)ptr[i]);
}

(uint8_t will always be a character type in all real world systems except on some dysfunctional legacy DSPs that shouldn't be used for any purpose.)

answered Nov 12, 2020 at 8:32

Lundin

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3 Comments

Arindam Kashyap Over a year ago

As iam limited to use the stdlib.h,stdio.h and malloc.h. It shows an compiler error,can you please tell me any other method .Thanks for the help @Lundin

Lundin Over a year ago

@AndrewAllen I didn't test this code. Did you include stdint.h? Otherwise, if that's not possible, simply switch uint8_t for unsigned char.

Arindam Kashyap Over a year ago

no i didn't include the stdint. then i use unsigned char instead of uint_8 and i got the hexadecimal values as output(is that my ans?) @lundin Thanks for the help.

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