endianness

There is an insightful question about reading a C/C++ data structure in C# from a byte array , but I cannot get the code to work for my collection of big-endian (network byte order) bytes. (EDIT: Note that my real struct has more than just one field.) Is there a way to marshal the bytes into a big-endian version of the structure and then pull out the values in the endianness of the framework (that of the host, which is usually little-endian)? (Note, reversing the array of bytes will not work - each value's bytes must be reversed, which does not give you the same collection as reversing all of

I'm having troubles wrapping my head on the two. I understand how to represent something in big endian. For example -12 is 1111 1111 1111 0100 But why is the little endian representation 1111 0100 1111 1111 instead of 0100 1111 1111 1111? Endianness is about byte address order . Little endian means the lower significant bytes get the lower addresses. Big endian means the other way around. So it's about the bytes (8-bit chunks) not nibbles (4-bit chunks). Most computers we use (there are a few exceptions) address bytes at the individual address level. Taking the -12 example: Little endian, in

I'm trying to improve my understanding of the STFS file format by using a program to read all the different bits of information. Using a website with a reference of which offsets contain what information, I wrote some code that has a binary reader go through the file and place the values in the correct variables. The problem is that all the data is SUPPOSED to be Big Endian, and everything the binary reader read is Little Endian. So, what's the best way to go about fixing this? Can I create a mimic class of Binary reader that returns a reversed array of bytes? Is there something I can change

Is it possible to convert float s from big to little endian? I have a big endian value from a PowerPC platform that I am sendING via TCP to a Windows process (little endian). This value is a float , but when I memcpy the value into a Win32 float type and then call _byteswap_ulong on that value, I always get 0.0000? What am I doing wrong? simply reverse the four bytes works float ReverseFloat( const float inFloat ) { float retVal; char *floatToConvert = ( char* ) & inFloat; char *returnFloat = ( char* ) & retVal; // swap the bytes into a temporary buffer returnFloat[0] = floatToConvert[3];

As written in the heading, my question is, why does TCP/IP use big endian encoding when transmitting data and not the alternative little-endian scheme? RFC1700 stated it must be so . (and defined network byte order as big-endian). The convention in the documentation of Internet Protocols is to express numbers in decimal and to picture data in "big-endian" order [COHEN]. That is, fields are described left to right, with the most significant octet on the left and the least significant octet on the right. The reference they make is to On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace Cohen, D. Computer The