I have 3 unsigned bytes that are coming over the wire separately.
[byte1, byte2, byte3]
I need to convert these to a signed 32-bit value but I am not quite sure how to handle the sign of the negative values.
I thought of copying the bytes to the upper 3 bytes in the int32 and then shifting everything to the right but I read this may have unexpected behavior.
Is there an easier way to handle this?
The representation is using two's complement.
You could use:
uint32_t sign_extend_24_32(uint32_t x) {
const int bits = 24;
uint32_t m = 1u << (bits - 1);
return (x ^ m) - m;
}
This works because:
Templated version
template<class T>
T sign_extend(T x, const int bits) {
T m = 1;
m <<= bits - 1;
return (x ^ m) - m;
}