CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c
delve123
delve123

Reputation: 35

Printing of negative value in c via printf

I am running a test code for learning C. However I am curious regarding representation of negative numbers n hexadecimal, for which I have written a test-code. To my surprise, by running that test-code I am receiving only zero

    union unin
    {
        char chrArray[4];
        float flotVal;
    }uninObj;

    uninObj.flotVal = -25;

    printf("%x %x %x %x",uninObj.chrArray[0], uninObj.chrArray[1], /
           uninObj.chrArray[2], uninObj.chrArray[3]);
    printf("\n Float in hex: %x",uninObj.flotVal);
    return 0;

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2182

Answers (3)

John Bode
John Bode

Reputation: 123448

First of all, this statement is flat-out wrong:

printf("\n Float in hex: %x",uninObj.flotVal);

%x expects its corresponding argument to be unsigned int, and passing an argument of a different type (as you do here) results in undefined behavior - the output could literally be anything.

As of C99, you can use the %a or %A specifiers to print a hexadecimal representation of the floating-point value ([+|-]x.xxxx..., where each x is a hex digit). This is not the same thing as the value's binary representation in memory, though.

For the union, I'd suggest you use unsigned char for chrArray and use %hhx to print out each byte:

union unin
{
    unsigned char chrArray[sizeof (float)];
    float flotVal;
}uninObj;

printf("%hhx %hhx %hhx %hhx",uninObj.chrArray[0], uninObj.chrArray[1], 
       uninObj.chrArray[2], uninObj.chrArray[3]);

The hh length modifier in %hhx says that the corresponding argument has type unsigned char, rather than the unsigned int %x usually expects.

Upvotes: 0

Deepstop
Deepstop

Reputation: 3807

On my CentOS 7 Intel 64 architecture, sizeof(float) is 4. So little endian result that I see on my test of 00 00 C8 C1 is a negative number. The Intel single precision floating point representation is:

1 bit sign
8 bit exponent
23 bit significand (with the first 1 bit implied)

As the Intel architecture is little-endian, the floating point value for 00 00 C8 C1 is 1100 0001 1100 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000. The first 1 means the number is negative. The next 8 bits, 10000011 (Decimal 131), are the exponent, and the next 4 bits 1001, with the implied 1 bit 11001, is the number 25 shifted right 4 bits. The exponent of 131 is offset from 127 by 4, which is the number of bits that 1.1001 is shifted left to get back to 25.

On a 64 bit representation, the exponent is 11 bits, and the exponent offset is 1023. So you would expect the number to be 1 (negative sign), Decimal 1027 in 11 bits 100 0000 0011, then 25 decimal as 1001 with the implied leading 1 bit (as in the single precision version), then all zeroes which together is C0 39 00 00 , 00 00 00 00. You can see that the last 4 bytes are all zeros. But this is still little-endian, so as a 64 bit number it would look like 00 00 00 00 00 00 39 C0. So you are getting all zeros if you print the first 4 bytes.

You would see non-zero values from your program either by (a) Specifying an 8 character array in the declaration and printing all 8 (and you would see two bytes with 39 C0), or (b) using a value other than -25 in your test that requires more binary digits to represent like a large prime number or an irrational number (as suggested by @David C. Rankin).

Checking sizeof(float) would determine what your floating point size (in bytes) and I would expect you to see it as 8, because you are seeing zeroes and not C8 C1 like I do.

Upvotes: 1

Weather Vane
Weather Vane

Reputation: 34584

Passing float to a specifier expecting unsigned int is undefined behaviour.

Furthermore, the unsigned int expected by %x is not guaranteed to be the same size as float. So the attempt to trick printf that way may or may not "work".

Anyway, for a variadic function such as printf the compiler will promote an argument of type float to double, so that may be the reason why you (and I) get 0 output.

On my system
sizeof(double) is 8.
sizeof(unsigned int) is 4.

And if you look at the bytes output for that part of the union, the first two are 0. So having passed 8 bytes to the function instead of the 4 expected by %x, the data is aligned in a way that %x is getting four 0 value bytes.

Upvotes: 4

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