Single quoted string to uint in c#

Question

I was translating some C++ to C# code and I saw the below definiton:

#define x 'liaM'

First, what does this single quoted constant mean? Do I make it a string constant in c#?

Second, this constant is assigned as value to a uint variable in C++. How does that work?

uint m = x;

Since your question is predominantly about the meaning of some C++ code, I'd have added that language tag as well as the C# one. — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Oct 21 '13 at 14:11
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3683602/single-quotes-vs-double-quotes-in-c — Trevor Elliott, Oct 21 '13 at 14:14
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7459939/what-do-single-quotes-do-in-c-when-used-on-multiple-characters — Marius Bancila, Oct 21 '13 at 14:14

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 21 '13 at 14:17

4

This is sometimes called a FOURCC. There's a Windows API that can convert from a string into a FOURCC called mmioStringToFOURCC and here's some C# code to do the same thing:

public static int ChunkIdentifierToInt32(string s)
{
    if (s.Length != 4) throw new ArgumentException("Must be a four character string");
    var bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s);
    if (bytes.Length != 4) throw new ArgumentException("Must encode to exactly four bytes");
    return BitConverter.ToInt32(bytes, 0);
}

answered Oct 21 '13 at 14:17

Mark Heath

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Why not just `BitConverter.ToInt32(char[] { 'l', 'i', 'a', 'M' });` and skip the string entirely? – Ben Voigt Oct 21 '13 at 14:29
@BenVoigt yes, even better. I wrote the code above as a drop-in replacement for calls to mmioStringToFOURCC – Mark Heath Oct 21 '13 at 14:41
Actually, my comment should have used `byte[]` – Ben Voigt Oct 21 '13 at 14:46

Single quoted string to uint in c#

1 Answers1