How can a Z80 assembly program find out the address stored in the SP register?

Question

I'm wondering how to write a program in Z80 assembler that discovers the value stored in the SP register.

From what I've seen, the only instructions that touch the SP register are:

• LD SP, HL/IX/IY
• EX (SP), HL/IX/IY
• PUSH / POP

However, none of them seem to load the address stored in the SP register anywhere. Is there a way to do it?

Answer 1

The standard way would be adding it to HL. After clearing HL that is.

    LD  HL,0
    ADD HL,SP

Voila.

This is not only already available with the 8080,

    DAD  SP   ; Same opcode (39h), same workings

thus preferable, but as well very handy when setting up a pointer to parameters on stack as, of course, any other constant than 0 can be used and added.

Now, the Z80 did in addition bring a way to store SP with the ED group:

    LD  (loc),SP

With 4 bytes (ED 73 ll hh) it's as long as the LD/ADD sequence and only one T-cycle faster (20 vs. 21) while restricting the store to a fixed address, which may not be always handy - accessing SP is quite often done during task switch or alike where hard coded addresses are a bad idea.