View integer on memory locations allocated as char in Visual C++ 2008 debugger

Question

I'm using Visual C++ 2008 to write and debug my project. I have a char* pointer. I want to view 4 bytes starting at my pointer as an integer in the debugger. How do I do it? (int)(*pointer) comes to mind but I'm afraid it will simply take the 1-byte value pointed to by pointer and convert it to an integer.

Answer 1

You have to cast your pointer to the desired pointer type and then dereference, like so:

*(int*)(pointer)

This works in GDB, though I imagine it's similar in other debuggers.