Question

I ran into some trouble when converting bytes to gigabytes in my current project. Initially I did this:

 long requiredDiskSpace = 5000000000000; // In bytes
 int gb = (int)requiredDiskSpace / 1024 / 1024 / 1024;

This calculation becomes 0. (Correct should be 4 656). Then I switched to the decimal type, like this:

 long requiredDiskSpace = 5000000000000; // In bytes
 decimal gb = requiredDiskSpace / 1024 / 1024 / 1024;
 int gbAsInt = (int)gb;

This calculation (correctly) makes gbAsInt 4 656.

Now, my question is simply; why? To me, the calculations look similar, as I’m not interested in any decimal numbers I don’t understand why I can’t just use int in the actual calculation.

Answer 1

The problem is (int)requiredDiskSpace, the value 5000000000000 is way too big for an integer.