Our website uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience.
Accept
to the top
close form

Fill out the form in 2 simple steps below:

Your contact information:

Step 1
Congratulations! This is your promo code!

Desired license type:

Step 2
Team license
Enterprise license
** By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement
close form
Request our prices
New License
License Renewal
--Select currency--
USD
EUR
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
Free PVS‑Studio license for Microsoft MVP specialists
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
To get the licence for your open-source project, please fill out this form
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
I am interested to try it on the platforms:
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
check circle
Message submitted.

Your message has been sent. We will email you at


If you haven't received our response, please do the following:
check your Spam/Junk folder and click the "Not Spam" button for our message.
This way, you won't miss messages from our team in the future.

>
>
>
V566. Integer constant is converted to …
menu mobile close menu
Analyzer diagnostics
General Analysis (C++)
General Analysis (C#)
General Analysis (Java)
Micro-Optimizations (C++)
Diagnosis of 64-bit errors (Viva64, C++)
Customer specific requests (C++)
MISRA errors
AUTOSAR errors
OWASP errors (C#)
Problems related to code analyzer
Additional information
toggle menu Contents

V566. Integer constant is converted to pointer. Check for an error or bad coding style.

Aug 13 2013

The analyzer detected an explicit conversion of a numerical value to the pointer type. This warning is usually generated for code fragments where numbers are used for flagging objects' states. Such methods are not necessarily errors but usually signal a bad code design.

Consider this sample:

const DWORD SHELL_VERSION = 0x4110400;
...
char *ptr = (char*) SHELL_VERSION;
...
if (ptr == (char*) SHELL_VERSION)

The constant value which marks some special state is saved into the pointer. This code might work well for a long time, but if an object is created by the address 0x4110400, we will not determine if this is a magic flag or just an object. If you want to use a special flag, you'd better write it so:

const DWORD SHELL_VERSION = 0x4110400;
...
char *ptr = (char*)(&SHELL_VERSION);
...
if (ptr == (char*)(&SHELL_VERSION))

Note. To make false alarms fewer, the V566 message is not generated for a range of cases. For instance, it does not appear if values -1, 0, 0xcccccccc and 0xdeadbeef are magic numbers; if a number lies within the range between 0 and 65535 and is cast to a string pointer. This enables us to skip correct code fragments like the following one:

CString sMessage( (LPCSTR)IDS_FILE_WAS_CHANGED ) ;

This method of loading a string from resources is rather popular but certainly you'd better use MAKEINTRESOURCE. There are some other exceptions as well.

This diagnostic is classified as: