Question

Ok so here is the deal. I am reading 1 byte at a time from a binary file. And then i put it in an int variable like this:

    l = *rbyte;
    l <<8;
    <read another byte>
    l |=*rbyte;
    l <<8;
    <read another byte>
    l |=*rbyte;
    l <<8;
    <read another byte>
    l |=*rbyte;

Now this should presumably work fine, and for binary data like 00 00 00 0D it is returning 13, and like that for 6 and 9. However for binary data 00 00 80 00, it is simply returning 128. When it should actually return 32768. What gives?

Answer 1

Because you aren’t assigning the result of your left shift to anything. The shift operators aren’t like ++ and -- they don’t automatically update their argument.

Change your shift lines to

l = l << 8;