read pixel value in bmp file

Code of readBMP function after padding fix:

unsigned char* ReadBMP(char* filename)
{
    int i;
    FILE* f = fopen(filename, "rb");

    if(f == NULL)
        throw "Argument Exception";

    unsigned char info[54];
    fread(info, sizeof(unsigned char), 54, f); // read the 54-byte header

    // extract image height and width from header
    int width = *(int*)&info[18];
    int height = *(int*)&info[22];

    cout << endl;
    cout << "  Name: " << filename << endl;
    cout << " Width: " << width << endl;
    cout << "Height: " << height << endl;

    int row_padded = (width*3 + 3) & (~3);
    unsigned char* data = new unsigned char[row_padded];
    unsigned char tmp;

    for(int i = 0; i < height; i++)
    {
        fread(data, sizeof(unsigned char), row_padded, f);
        for(int j = 0; j < width*3; j += 3)
        {
            // Convert (B, G, R) to (R, G, B)
            tmp = data[j];
            data[j] = data[j+2];
            data[j+2] = tmp;

            cout << "R: "<< (int)data[j] << " G: " << (int)data[j+1]<< " B: " << (int)data[j+2]<< endl;
        }
    }

    fclose(f);
    return data;
}

The following code snippet is not complete, and contains lots of hidden assumptions and bugs. I wrote it from scratch for a university course project from mere observation, where it minimally fulfilled all the requirements. I didn't work on it any more, because there must be libraries that would do the job way better.

Here are the conditions where it worked okay (some assumptions are pointed out in the comments):

1. It ran on Windows, I'm not sure about other platforms
2. It works for 24-bit color BMP images
3. It assumes that the width of the image is a multiple of 4, so it doesn't handle the padding bytes in case it's not
4. It decodes the image width and height as 32-bit little endian integers
5. It returns a pointer to dynamically allocated memory, it may cause memory leak if it's not released by the caller

Other answers have covered some of these issues.

---

You can try this one:

unsigned char* readBMP(char* filename)
{
    int i;
    FILE* f = fopen(filename, "rb");
    unsigned char info[54];

    // read the 54-byte header
    fread(info, sizeof(unsigned char), 54, f); 

    // extract image height and width from header
    int width = *(int*)&info[18];
    int height = *(int*)&info[22];

    // allocate 3 bytes per pixel
    int size = 3 * width * height;
    unsigned char* data = new unsigned char[size];

    // read the rest of the data at once
    fread(data, sizeof(unsigned char), size, f); 
    fclose(f);

    for(i = 0; i < size; i += 3)
    {
            // flip the order of every 3 bytes
            unsigned char tmp = data[i];
            data[i] = data[i+2];
            data[i+2] = tmp;
    }

    return data;
}

Now data should contain the (R, G, B) values of the pixels. The color of pixel (i, j) is stored at data[3 * (i * width + j)], data[3 * (i * width + j) + 1] and data[3 * (i * width + j) + 2].

In the last part, the swap between every first and third pixel is done because I found that the color values are stored as (B, G, R) triples, not (R, G, B).

I can't comment on the top level answer because I don't have enough stackoverflow rep yet, but I just wanted to point out one very critical bug with that implementation.

Some bitmaps can be written with a negative height, so when you try to allocate your image data buffer, your code will crash with std::bad_alloc. Bitmaps with negative height means that the image data is stored top to bottom instead of the traditional bottom to top. Therefore, a slightly better version of the top level answer is (still not including portability for systems with different endianness and size of bytes):

unsigned char* readBMP(char* filename)
{
    int i;
    FILE* f = fopen(filename, "rb");
    unsigned char info[54];
    fread(info, sizeof(unsigned char), 54, f); // read the 54-byte header

    // extract image height and width from header
    int width, height;
    memcpy(&width, info + 18, sizeof(int));
    memcpy(&height, info + 22, sizeof(int));

    int heightSign = 1;
    if (height < 0){
        heightSign = -1;
    }

    int size = 3 * width * abs(height);
    unsigned char* data = new unsigned char[size]; // allocate 3 bytes per pixel
    fread(data, sizeof(unsigned char), size, f); // read the rest of the data at once
    fclose(f);

    if(heightSign == 1){
        for(i = 0; i < size; i += 3)
        {
            //code to flip the image data here....
        }
    }
    return data;
}

Here is a working C++ version of the answer:

#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <array>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>

std::vector<char> readBMP(const std::string &file)
{
    static constexpr size_t HEADER_SIZE = 54;

    std::ifstream bmp(file, std::ios::binary);

    std::array<char, HEADER_SIZE> header;
    bmp.read(header.data(), header.size());

    auto fileSize = *reinterpret_cast<uint32_t *>(&header[2]);
    auto dataOffset = *reinterpret_cast<uint32_t *>(&header[10]);
    auto width = *reinterpret_cast<uint32_t *>(&header[18]);
    auto height = *reinterpret_cast<uint32_t *>(&header[22]);
    auto depth = *reinterpret_cast<uint16_t *>(&header[28]);

    std::cout << "fileSize: " << fileSize << std::endl;
    std::cout << "dataOffset: " << dataOffset << std::endl;
    std::cout << "width: " << width << std::endl;
    std::cout << "height: " << height << std::endl;
    std::cout << "depth: " << depth << "-bit" << std::endl;

    std::vector<char> img(dataOffset - HEADER_SIZE);
    bmp.read(img.data(), img.size());

    auto dataSize = ((width * 3 + 3) & (~3)) * height;
    img.resize(dataSize);
    bmp.read(img.data(), img.size());

    char temp = 0;

    for (auto i = dataSize - 4; i >= 0; i -= 3)
    {
        temp = img[i];
        img[i] = img[i+2];
        img[i+2] = temp;

        std::cout << "R: " << int(img[i] & 0xff) << " G: " << int(img[i+1] & 0xff) << " B: " << int(img[i+2] & 0xff) << std::endl;
    }

    return img;
}