Question

int x = 5;
cout<<(char)x;

the code above outputs an int x in raw binary, but only 1 byte. what I need it to do is output the x as 4-bytes in binary, because in my code, x can be anywhere between 0 and 2^32-1, since

cout<<(int)x;

doesn’t do the trick, how would I do it?

Answer 1

You can use the std::ostream::write() member function:

std::cout.write(reinterpret_cast<const char*>(&x), sizeof x);

Note that you would usually want to do this with a stream that has been opened in binary mode.