Hexadecimal to Binary in C

What is hexadecimal?

The hexadecimal is a positional system that represents the numbers in sixteen distinct symbols by using 16 as a base. These distinct symbols, i.e., "0-9" represents the values from zero to nine, and "A-F" represents the values from ten to fifteen.

What is Binary?

The binary is a number which is represented with a base 2 numeral system, and it uses two symbols, i.e., 0 and 1.

Examples

Suppose the hexadecimal number is A12C. Now we calculate the binary value of the hexadecimal number.

Hexadecimal number=A12C

Binary value equivalent to A is 1010

Binary value equivalent to 1 is 0001

Binary value equivalent to 2 is 0010

Binary value equivalent to C is 1100

Therefore, the binary value equivalent to A12C is 1010000100101100.

Note: To convert hexadecimal into a binary number, the binary value of each digit of a hexadecimal number is evaluated and combined to get the binary number of a given hexadecimal number.

Let's understand through an example.

In the above code, we want to calculate the binary value of "A12C". We first store this value in a character array named as hex[], and then we pass this array to a hextobin() function. The hextobin() will calculate the binary value of the number, it iterates over each element of an array through a while loop, and finds the binary value of each corresponding element through a switch statement.

Output

1010000100101100