Mastering Assembly Programming

Data transfer instructions

Data transfer instructions, as the name of the group suggests, are used to transfer data between registers or between registers and memory. Some of them may have an immediate value as their source operand. The following example illustrates their usage.

 push  ebx                 ; save EBX register on stack mov   ax, 0xc001          ; move immediate value to AX register movzx ebx, ax             ; move zero-extended content of AX to EBX                             ; register                            ; EBX = 0x0000c001 bswap ebx                 ; reverse byte order of EBX register                             ; EBX = 0x01c00000 mov   [some_address], ebx ; move content of EBX register to                             ; memory at 'some_address'                            ; content of 'some_address' =                             ; 0x01c00000                            ; The above two lines of code could have                             ; been replaced with: ; movbe [some_address], ebx ...