Force C++ structure to pack tightly

Question

I am attempting to read in a binary file. The problem is that the creator of the file took no time to properly align data structures to their natural boundaries and everythi

Answer 1

If you're using GCC, you can do struct __attribute__ ((packed)) { short a; int b; }

On VC++ you can do #pragma pack(1). This option is also supported by GCC.

#pragma pack(push, 1)
struct { short a; int b; }
#pragma pack(pop)

Other compilers may have options to do a tight packing of the structure with no padding.