C – Printf Char as Hexadecimal

You are seeing the ffffff because char is signed on your system. In C, vararg functions such as printf will promote all integers smaller than int to int. Since char is an integer (8-bit signed integer in your case), your chars are being promoted to int via sign-extension.

Since c0 and 80 have a leading 1-bit (and are negative as an 8-bit integer), they are being sign-extended while the others in your sample don't.

char    int
c0 -> ffffffc0
80 -> ffffff80
61 -> 00000061

Here's a solution:

char ch = 0xC0;
printf("%x", ch & 0xff);

This will mask out the upper bits and keep only the lower 8 bits that you want.

Here's a small program that illustrates the problem I think you might be having:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    char arr[] = { 0, 16, 127, 128, 255 };
    for (int i = 0; i < sizeof arr; i ++) {
        printf(" %2x", arr[i]);
    }
    putchar('\n');
    return 0;
}

On my system (on which plain char is signed), I get this output:

  0 10 7f ffffff80 ffffffff

The value 255, when stored in a (signed) char, is stored as -1. In the printf call, it's promoted to (signed) int -- but the "%2x" format tells printf to treat it as an unsigned int, so it displays fffffffff.

Make sure that your mesg and mesg_check arrays are defined as arrays of unsigned char, not plain char.

UPDATE: Rereading this answer more than a year later, I realize it's not quite correct. Here's a program that works correctly on my system, and will almost certainly work on any reasonable system:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    unsigned char arr[] = { 0, 16, 127, 128, 255 };
    for (int i = 0; i < sizeof arr; i ++) {
        printf(" %02x", arr[i]);
    }
    putchar('\n');
    return 0;
}

The output is:

 00 10 7f 80 ff

An argument of type unsigned char is promoted to (signed) int (assuming that int can hold all values of type unsigned char, i.e., INT_MAX >= UCHAR_MAX, which is the case on practically all systems). So the argument arr[i] is promoted to int, while the " %02x" format requires an argument of type unsigned int.

The C standard strongly implies, but doesn't quite state directly, that arguments of corresponding signed and unsigned types are interchangeable as long as they're within the range of both types -- which is the case here.

To be completely correct, you need to ensure that the argument is actually of type unsigned int:

printf("%02x", (unsigned)arr[i]);