问题
Is there need to convert to network/host byte ordering when sending and receiving strings. The available functions (such as htons()) only work with 16 and 32 bit integers. I also know for a fact that a single char shouldn't make a difference, as generally, it is a byte large. However what about strings ?
The following is a code snippet
int len; recv(fd, &len, sizeof (int), 0);
len = ntohl(len);
char* string = malloc(sizeof (char) * (len + 1));
int received = recv(fd, string, sizeof (char) * len, 0);
string[len] = '\0';
回答1:
It depends on the encoding of the string.
If it's a byte-oriented format (plain old ASCII or UTF-8), then it doesn't matter.
If it uses "code points" larger than a single byte, then yes it matters.
回答2:
C strings are simply an array of one byte values with a convention of a one byte special value to terminate them, thus there is nothing to swap. Shorts and ints are multiple byte values which get stored differently according to the hardware requirements, thus the need to normalize their storage order across the network (in case the receiver has a different hardware architecture).
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15877643/is-there-need-to-convert-byte-order-for-strings