Any way to shorten or truncate an uint32_t?

[NerdyChick27]

I'm writing a simple cryptography program that uses ISAAC, and I've run into a wall. I am planning on XORing each of my input bytes with 1 random byte each that gets returned from the ISAAC PRNG.

This is basically what I'm trying to do

while(input character != EOF){
read a byte of input;
xor that byte with a random byte from ISAAC;
print that byte;
}

I can't seem how to limit the uint32_t that gets returned from the prng to a single byte, instead I have several. What can I do to isolate a byte from a uint32_t typedef?

[Narue]

What can I do to isolate a byte from a uint32_t typedef?

You can use the bitwise operators to split your 32-bit value into four bytes:

uint32_t value;
uint8_t bytes[4];

/* ... */

bytes[0] = (value >> 24) & 0xFF;
bytes[1] = (value >> 16) & 0xFF;
bytes[2] = (value >> 8) & 0xFF;
bytes[3] = (value & 0xFF);

[NerdyChick27]

thanks for the speedy reply :) Do you mind explaining what exactly is happening in that code?

Are the bits with higher value are getting shifted towards the lower indexes of bytes[]?

[Narue]

Do you mind explaining what exactly is happening in that code?

It's extracting the bytes from most significant to least significant by shifting and masking away all but the least significant byte:

01010101111111110000000011110000
00000000000000000000000001010101 -- Shift right 24 bits
                        01010101 -- Mask the low byte

01010101111111110000000011110000
00000000000000000101010111111111 -- Shift right 16 bits
                        11111111 -- Mask the low byte

01010101111111110000000011110000
00000000010101011111111100000000 -- Shift right 8 bytes
                        00000000 -- Mask the low byte

01010101111111110000000011110000
                        11110000 -- Mask the low byte

Each of those bytes are then assigned to a smaller type (uint8_t).