If I understand the code right, your trying to pass in to appendBinaryStringInfo an "address" or reference to the n8, n16, or n32 variables and cast them so that a char * pointer can access that address space. Through some testing that I've been doing (outputting the values in the appendBinaryStringInfo function), I never seem to see any data, The variable pointer that references the "n8, n16, or n32" value is not holding any data in the appendBinaryStringInfo function.
How are you looking at the data? If you're treating the pointer as if it were a null-terminated string, it's likely that the first byte is a null character much of the time. Since this is binary data (not character data), you'll need to look at the individual bytes. If you're using gdb, use 'x' command instead of the 'p' command. If you've thrown a printf() into the code, you can't use a "%s" format specifier, you'll have to look at the bytes one at a time using something like "%02X".
-- Korry
