Cleanest way to combine two shorts to an int

Question

I have two 16-bit shorts (s1 and s2), and I\'m trying to combine them into a single 32-bit integer (i1). According to the spec I\'m dealing with, s1 is the most significant

Answer 1

What you've got looks nearly correct, but will probably fail if the second part is negative; the implicit conversion to int will probably sign-extend and fill the upper 16 bits with ones. A cast to unsigned short would probably prevent that from happening, but the best way to be sure is to mask off the bits.

const utils::int32 combineddata = ((data.first<<16) | ((data.second) & 0xffff));