Question

I’m beginner with C and I am learning on my own.
I am trying to convert an int to binary for bitwise operations, and I am not really sure how to do it? I have tried to use mod and other mathematics to do it, but I have been unsuccessful. I have searched around and have not found a clear way of this. Please assist.

Answer 1

You don’t need to do any conversion of an int to use bitwise operators on it. They automatically work on the bits that compose the int.

If you want to view the binary representation of a number, you can use (assuming the 8 least significant bits)…

int num = 4;

int i;

for (i = 7; i >= 0; i--) {
    printf("%d", (num >> i) & 1);
}

CodePad.

This uses bitwise operators >> (right shift) and & (and).