Behavior of cout << hex with uint8 and uint16

Question

I\'m noticing that cout << hex is giving me strange results, and I cannot find anywhere that answers why. What I am doing is simply assigning some values to

Answer 1

std::uint8_t is an alias for unsigned char:

typedef unsigned char uint8_t;

So the overload of the inserter that takes a char& is chosen, and the ASCII representation of 0xab is written, which could technically vary by your operating system, as 0xab is in the range of Extended ASCII.

You have to cast it to an integer:

std::cout << std::hex << static_cast(a) << std::endl;