How do I handle byte order differences when reading/writing floating-point types in C?

Question

I\'m devising a file format for my application, and I\'d obviously like for it to work on both big-endian and little-endian systems. I\'ve already found working solutions fo

Answer 1

XML is probably the most portable way to do it.

However, it appears that you already have most of the parser built, but are stuck on the float/double issue. I would suggest writing it out as a string (to whatever precision you desire) and then reading that back in.

Unless all your target platforms use IEEE-754 floats (and doubles), no byte-swapping tricks will work for you.