How Can I Work with Binary Literals in C and C ?

Working with Binary Literals in C and C

When working with binary numbers, developers often encounter the need to represent them explicitly in their code. In C and C , the question arises whether there is a native way to handle binary literals.

Attempt and Challenges

One attempt to represent a binary number is to use character literals with the prefix "000", as in:

const char x = 00010000;

However, this approach is unworkable because the leading zeros in the number are interpreted as octal digits.

GCC Extension for Binary Literals

For compilers that support the GCC extension (which is now part of the C 14 standard), binary literals can be expressed using the prefix "0b", followed by the binary digits. This extension provides a direct way to represent binary numbers in code:

int x = 0b00010000;

This code explicitly sets the variable x to the binary value 00010000 (base 2).

Note:

It's important to note that this extension is not supported by all compilers. If portability is a concern, it's recommended to use hexadecimal literals or bitwise operations to manipulate binary values.

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