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Bit Field in C

Ho to bit filed in c

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61 views2 pages

Bit Field in C

Ho to bit filed in c

Uploaded by

jmpmys
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Bit Field in C

In C, we can specify size of structure and union members in bits to optimize memory space. The idea is to
use memory efficiently when we know that the value of a field or group of fields will never exceed a limit
or is within a small range. For example, we know that day value of a date cannot exceed 31, month of
date cannot exceed 12, etc.

Bit Field Declaration

The declaration of a bit-field has the following form inside a structure −


struct
{
type [member_name] : width ;
};
The following table describes the variable elements of a bit field where−
type : An integer type that determines how a bit-field's value is interpreted. The type may be int, signed
int, or unsigned int.
member_name : The name of the bit-field.
Width : The number of bits in the bit-field. The width must be less than or equal to the bit width of the
specified type.
For example, consider the following declaration of date without the use of bit fields.
#include <stdio.h>
// A simple representation of the date
struct date {
unsigned int d;
unsigned int m;
unsigned int y;
};
int main()
{
printf("Size of date is %lu bytes\n", sizeof(struct date));
struct date dt = { 31, 12, 2014 };
printf("Date is %d/%d/%d", dt.d, dt.m, dt.y);
}
Output:
Size of date is 12 bytes
Date is 31/12/2014
The above representation of ‘date’ takes 12 bytes on a compiler where an unsigned int takes 4 bytes.
Since we know that the value of ‘d’ is always from 1 to 31, the value of ‘m’ is from 1 to 12, we can optimize
the memory using bit fields like the code below:

#include <stdio.h>
// A simple representation of the date
struct date {
unsigned int d : 5;
unsigned int m : 5;
unsigned int y;
};
int main()
{
printf("Size of date is %lu bytes\n", sizeof(struct date));
struct date dt = { 31, 12, 2014 };
printf("Date is %d/%d/%d", dt.d, dt.m, dt.y);
}

Output:
Size of date is 8 bytes
Date is 31/12/2014
In the above code the structure requires 8 bytes of memory space for ‘dt’ variable, but only 5 bits will be
used to store the values for ‘d’ and ‘m’ and 4 bytes for ‘y’.

Properties of bit fields:

1. A special unnamed bit field of size 0 is used to force alignment on next boundary.
2. We cannot have pointers to bit field members as they may not start at a byte boundary.
3. We can have static members in a structure/class, but bit fields cannot be static.
4. Array of bit fields is not allowed. For example, the below program fails in the compilation.

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