Question

I think that this is not possible because Int32 has 1 bit sign and have 31 bit of numeric information and Int16 has 1 bit sign and 15 bit of numeric information and this leads to having 2 bit signs and 30 bits of information.

If this is true then I cannot have one Int32 into two Int16. Is this true?

Thanks in advance.

EXTRA INFORMATION: Using Vb.Net but I think that I can translate without problems a C# answer.

What initially I wanted to do was to convert one UInt32 to two UInt16 as this is for a library that interacts with WORD based machines. Then I realized that Uint is not CLS compliant and tried to do the same with Int32 and Int16.

EVEN WORSE: Doing a = CType(c And &HFFFF, Int16); throws OverflowException. I expected that statement being the same as a = (Int16)(c & 0xffff); (which does not throw an exception).

Answer 1

This should work:

int original = ...;
byte[] bytes = BitConverter.GetBytes(original);
short firstHalf = BitConverter.ToInt16(bytes, 0);
short secondHalf = BitConverter.ToInt16(bytes, 2);

EDIT:

tested with 0x7FFFFFFF, it works

byte[] recbytes = new byte[4];
recbytes[0] = BitConverter.GetBytes(firstHalf)[0];
recbytes[1] = BitConverter.GetBytes(firstHalf)[1];
recbytes[2] = BitConverter.GetBytes(secondHalf)[0];
recbytes[3] = BitConverter.GetBytes(secondHalf)[1];
int reconstituted = BitConverter.ToInt32(recbytes, 0);