Question

In C, I would like to convert a signed char to an int, without sign extension. So if the signed char is 0xFF, the int would also be 0xFF. Simply casting to an int won’t work; the result would be 0xFFFFFFFF (on a 32-bit machine).

This seems to work (and is already pretty simple):

int convert(signed char sc) {
    return 0xFF & (int) sc; 
}

But is there a simpler or more idiomatic way?

Edit: Fixed function

Answer 1

You can cast to unsigned char first. Assuming a definition:

signed char c;

You could just do:

int i = (unsigned char)c;