How does one safely static_cast between unsigned int and int?

Question

I have an 8-character string representing a hexadecimal number and I need to convert it to an int. This conversion has to preserve the bit pattern for

Answer 1

While there are ways to do this using casts and conversions, most rely on undefined behavior that happen to have well-defined behaviors on some machines / with some compilers. Instead of relying on undefined behavior, copy the data:

int signed_val;
std::memcpy (signed_val, val, sizeof(int));
return signed_val;