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Advanced Programming Techniques in C

Endianness and the Union

Explore the concept of endianness and its impact on data storage using unions in C programming. Understand how byte order varies between little-endian and big-endian systems, and how this affects memory representation in your code. This lesson helps you grasp processor-specific data handling for better program reliability.

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Endianness

Endianness is a sequencing of bytes in a computer’s memory.

Let’s understand the union in more detail with the help of endianness. Have a look at the output of the code given below!

C
#include <stdio.h> 
int main( ) 
{
	// union declaration
	union a 
	{
		int i ;
		char ch[ 4 ] ; 
	} ;
	// Declares union variable
	union a z ; 
	// Assign value to union member
	z.i = 512 ;  
	// Print values of union members
	printf ( "%d %d %d %d %d\n", z.i, z.ch[ 0 ], z.ch[ 1 ] , z.ch[ 2 ], z.ch[ 3 ] ) ; 
}

The binary of 512 is ...