how to print memory bits in c

Question

I\'m learning how numbers are represented in memory. I want to know how to print the actual representation (binary or hexadecimal) in memory of some int and float variables.

Answer 1

You would need to assign a pointer to the variable in question to a char *, and treat it as an array of bytes of length sizeof(variable). Then you can print each byte in hex using the %X format specifier to printf.

You can define a function like this:

void print_bytes(void *ptr, int size) 
{
    unsigned char *p = ptr;
    int i;
    for (i=0; i

And call it like this:

int x = 123456;
double y = 3.14;
print_bytes(&x, sizeof(x));
print_bytes(&y, sizeof(y));