Home/ Questions/Q 3310726
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-17T21:47:35+00:00

I have a need to pass in an HRESULT value to a program as

  • 0

I have a need to pass in an HRESULT value to a program as a command line argument. I had intended to do so by passing the hex value, e.g.:

>receiver.exe 0x80048836

I’m trying to convert this string representation back into an HRESULT using wcstol, eg:

HRESULT hr = wcstol(argv[2], NULL, 16);

However, the value of the original HRESULT is usually greater than LONG_MAX, so in the line above hr ends up as 0x7fffffff.

So, two questions:

  1. I thought HRESULTS were just 32-bit integers? So I’m not sure how I’m getting back an HRESULT greater than LONG_MAX. It seems to work fine in the originating program, though (i.e. the HRESULT doesn’t overflow).

  2. Is there a way to get around the LONG_MAX restriction of wcstol? Maybe another version of the function that matches up with whatever size integer the HRESULT actually is?

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Check out wcstoul. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5k9xb7x1(v=VS.80).aspx
    The HRESULT does fit in 32 bits, but with the example you gave it uses the most significant bit, which is considered to act like a sign bit for signed integers. Using wcstoul will fit it into an unsigned long.

    LONG_MAX is 0x7FFFFFFF, the highest that can fit in the 31 least significant bits, leaving the top bit cleared, but ULONG_MAX goes up to 0xFFFFFFFF because it is unsigned.

    • 0