From: Ara.T.Howard@...
Date: 2005-04-26T08:04:31+09:00
Subject: Re: long conversion ...

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Zach Dennis wrote:

> I am reading in more binary data. This time I get 4 bytes with the
> following ASCII character values:
>
> 63
> 2
> 250
> 240
>
> I believe this is a set of 4 bytes that correspond to a unsigned long.
> The input number is 50. Can anyone make sense of this, or am I way off
> here. Thanks,

hi zach-


so you wan't a word that look like this:

   harp:~ > irb
   irb(main):001:0> printf "%32.32b\n", 50
   00000000000000000000000000110010
   => nil

but you have these four bytes:

   irb(main):002:0> printf "%8.8b\n", 63
   00111111
   => nil

   irb(main):003:0> printf "%8.8b\n", 2
   00000010
   => nil

   irb(main):004:0> printf "%8.8b\n", 250
   11111010
   => nil

   irb(main):005:0> printf "%8.8b\n", 240
   11110000
   => nil

so, not matter what order you put them in, you aren't going to get the bits for
50 out of 'em i'm afraid ;-(  in fact, since you know 50 fits into one byte
four bytes of a 'long' 50 will have to have three zero filled bytes for most
archs.

how is the data being written/read?

cheers.

-a
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