How to create integer poiner in an array of raw data?

I have a file called "config", this file contains header data and int16_t value, the problem is that I can't create pointer to that integer to use it in my code.

    std::vector<char> Config;
    int16_t Config_Number = &Config[18];

Doing this gives an error "value of type "char" cannot be used to initialize entity of type "int16_t"".

Also I don't want to convert values because in ASM I can just load data into registers and do anything what I want.

Solution

I would probably do something like this:

int16_t Config_Number = static_cast<int16_t>((config[18]<<8) | config[19]);

Depending on endianess, you might need:

int16_t Config_Number = static_cast<int16_t>((config[19]<<8) | config[18]);

...instead.

You could use memcpy or memmove instead, but I don't think it accomplishes much (in this case).

A bit of explanation:

reading and operating on individual chars from the array avoids any alignment issues.
The shift and | promote to int, so you probably want to explicitly narrow to int16_t before assigning (otherwise the compiler is likely to warning about a narrowing conversion).