How do I get bit-by-bit data from an integer value in C?

Question

I want to extract bits of a decimal number.

For example, 7 is binary 0111, and I want to get 0 1 1 1 all bits stored in bool. How can I do so?

OK, a loop is not a good option, can I do something else for this?

Answer 1

If you want the k-th bit of n, then do

(n & ( 1 << k )) >> k

Here we create a mask, apply the mask to n, and then right shift the masked value to get just the bit we want. We could write it out more fully as:

    int mask =  1 << k;
    int masked_n = n & mask;
    int thebit = masked_n >> k;

You can read more about bit-masking here.

Here is a program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int *get_bits(int n, int bitswanted){
  int *bits = malloc(sizeof(int) * bitswanted);

  int k;
  for(k=0; k<bitswanted; k++){
    int mask =  1 << k;
    int masked_n = n & mask;
    int thebit = masked_n >> k;
    bits[k] = thebit;
  }

  return bits;
}

int main(){
  int n=7;

  int  bitswanted = 5;

  int *bits = get_bits(n, bitswanted);

  printf("%d = ", n);

  int i;
  for(i=bitswanted-1; i>=0;i--){
    printf("%d ", bits[i]);
  }

  printf("\n");
}