Passing a negative to "%hu" in C

Question

I can't get it to work in CodeBlocks What will this code print? :

printf( "%hu" ,  ‐1 );

Solution

It will print 65535

"%hu" is an unsigned short int which is 16 bit.

-1 is "all-ones", e.g. 0xffff.ffff, but since it gets converted to short it is only 0xffff. Which is 65535 as unsigned.

Comments

[chux - Reinstate Monica]

Note: unsigned short int which is 16 bit is often true, but not defined by C. C defines unsigned short int to be at least 16 bit. -1 is "all-ones" is also very often true (2's complement) but not defined by C to be so.

[Support Ukraine]

@chux - True. In principle we can't tell what the code would print without knowledge of the system being used. However, I'm confident that most systems out there uses 16 bits for shorts and 2's complement representation for signed integers.