Advanced Programming Techniques in C/

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Endianness and the Union

Endianness and the Union

Get introduced to the endianness, i.e., little-endian and big-endian storage.

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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!

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#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 00000000 00000000 ...