Practice Exercise #2

Your job is to write a C function that prints, in hex, the values of the bytes allocated to some variable. The function's prototype is

       void DumpHex(void* pData, int byteLen);
     

       The 4 bytes starting at 0x7fff1081856C are: ff 01 30 4e
     

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  char     charVal = '0';
  int32_t  intVal = 1;
  float    floatVal = 1.0;
  double   doubleVal  = 1.0;

  typedef struct { 
    char     charVal;
    int32_t  intVal;
    float    floatVal;
    double   doubleVal;
  } Ex2Struct;
  Ex2Struct structVal = { '0', 1, 1.0, 1.0 };

  DumpHex(&charVal, sizeof(char));
  DumpHex(&intVal, sizeof(int32_t));
  DumpHex(&floatVal, sizeof(float));
  DumpHex(&doubleVal, sizeof(double));
  DumpHex(&structVal, sizeof(structVal));

  return EXIT_SUCCESS;  // EXIT_SUCCESS defined in stdlib.h.
}

• convince the compiler to let you access bytes in memory, starting from a void*

• use a for loop to iterate once for each byte in the float, using the pointer to extract that byte and print it out.

• figure out how to use format specifiers to printf in order to print out an uint8_t in lower-case hexadecimal, using exactly two digits. As a hint, take inspiration from this code:

  #include <inttypes.h>
  
  ...
    uint8_t a_byte = 0xD1;
    printf("The byte is: %02" PRIx8 " -- enjoy!\n", a_byte);
  ...

• figure out how to print a pointer value.

Your code should produce output that is identical to the following, except for values that might change from run to run because of randomness outside your control. That randomness includes addresses and the values of uninitialized data.

$bash gcc -Wall -std=gnu99 -o ex2 ex2.c
$bash ls
ex2 ex2.c
$bash ./ex2
The 1 bytes starting at 0x7fff3c84a1ff are: 30
The 4 bytes starting at 0x7fff3c84a1f4 are: 01 00 00 00
The 4 bytes starting at 0x7fff3c84a1f8 are: 00 00 80 3f
The 8 bytes starting at 0x7fff3c84a1e8 are: 00 00 00 00 00 00 f0 3f
The 24 bytes starting at 0x7fff3c84a1d0 are: 30 b0 f0 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 80 3f 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 f0 3f