Error while allocating and loading data from binary file

[worldly citrus]

hi, I'm trying to allocate some space with malloc to load a file as a character array, but I'm getting some weird data, the expected value of the first byte of the array is 0x49 ( "I" in the magic word in header) but I'm getting 0x0, 0x10 or 0x4C, this is what I wrote to get to allocate this data:

char* ID3Section = (char*)malloc(headerSize);
    
fread(ID3Section, headerSize, headerSize, song->fptr);
printf("data stored at: 0x%x\n", ID3Section);
printf("0x%x\n", ID3Section[0]);
return ID3Section;```

[trim pollen]

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[dawn mortar]

such trick would only work if mp3 header alignment would match your target architecture data alignment

also endianess

ah, I'm blind

you are using char

start with using unsigned char

and headerSize, headerSize makes no sense

as it asks fread to read headerSizer * headerSize bytes

[worldly citrus]

oh wait

[dawn mortar]

so it should be headerSize, 1

[worldly citrus]

oh wait yeah I'm telling it to load a huge ammout of data

I'm still getting random values though..

[dawn mortar]

maybe you should start by checking if fread succeeded, because maybe you have errors earlier?

it should return number of elements you asked for, so 1 in case of headerSize, 1

[worldly citrus]

it does seem to be working, I load the first 10 bytes as an array before loading the whole header to check if ID3 is in the file and the size

[dawn mortar]

that moves file pointer

[worldly citrus]

and it does open the file and identify the header

[dawn mortar]

so the next read starts from 11th byte

[worldly citrus]

oh wait fr?

[dawn mortar]

you may use rewind() to go back

[worldly citrus]

that fixed it lol

now I just gotta figure out why strstr is not working..

!solved