Convert big endian to little endian when reading from a binary file

Question

I've been looking around how to convert big-endian to little-endians. But I didn't find any good that could solve my problem. It seem to be there's many way you can do this conversion. Anyway this following code works ok in a big-endian system. But how should I write a conversion function so it will work on little-endian system as well?

This is a homework, but it just an extra since the systems at school running big-endian system. It's just that I got curious and wanted to make it work on my home computer also

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
   ifstream file;

   file.open("file.bin", ios::in | ios::binary);

   if(!file)
      cerr << "Not able to read" << endl;
   else
   {
      cout << "Opened" << endl;

      int i_var;
      double d_var;

      while(!file.eof())
      {
         file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&i_var) , sizeof(int) );
         file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&d_var) , sizeof(double) );
         cout << i_var << " " << d_var << endl;
      }
   }
   return 0;
}

Solved

So Big-endian VS Little-endian is just a reverse order of the bytes. This function i wrote seem to serve my purpose anyway. I added it here in case someone else would need it in future. This is for double only though, for integer either use the function torak suggested or you can modify this code by making it swap 4 bytes only.

double swap(double d)
{
   double a;
   unsigned char *dst = (unsigned char *)&a;
   unsigned char *src = (unsigned char *)&d;

   dst[0] = src[7];
   dst[1] = src[6];
   dst[2] = src[5];
   dst[3] = src[4];
   dst[4] = src[3];
   dst[5] = src[2];
   dst[6] = src[1];
   dst[7] = src[0];

   return a;
}

Answer 1

You could use a template for your endian swap that will be generalized for the data types:

#include <algorithm>

template <class T>
void endswap(T *objp)
{
  unsigned char *memp = reinterpret_cast<unsigned char*>(objp);
  std::reverse(memp, memp + sizeof(T));
}

Then your code would end up looking something like:

file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&i_var) , sizeof(int) );
endswap( &i_var );
file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&d_var) , sizeof(double) );  
endswap( &d_var );
cout << i_var << " " << d_var << endl;  

Answer 2

Linux provides endian.h, which has efficient endian swapping routines up to 64-bit. It also automagically accounts for your system's endianness. The 32-bit functions are defined like this:

uint32_t htobe32(uint32_t host_32bits);           // host to big-endian encoding
uint32_t htole32(uint32_t host_32bits);           // host to lil-endian encoding
uint32_t be32toh(uint32_t big_endian_32bits);     // big-endian to host encoding
uint32_t le32toh(uint32_t little_endian_32bits);  // lil-endian to host encoding

with similarly-named functions for 16 and 64-bit. So you just say

 x = le32toh(x);

to convert a 32-bit integer in little-endian encoding to the host CPU encoding. This is useful for reading little-endian data.

 x = htole32(x);

will convert from the host encoding to 32-bit little-endian. This is useful for writing little-endian data.

Note on BSD systems, the equivalent header file is sys/endian.h

Answer 3

You might be interested in the ntohl family of functions. These are designed to transform data from network to host byte order. Network byte order is big endian, therefore on big endian systems they don't do anything, while the same code compiled on a little endian system will perform the appropriate byte swaps.

Answer 4

It is good to add that MS has this supported on VS too check this inline functions:

• htond
• htonf
• htonl
• htonll
• htons

Answer 5

Assuming you're going to be going on, it's handy to keep a little library file of helper functions. 2 of those functions should be endian swaps for 4 byte values, and 2 byte values. For some solid examples (including code) check out this article.

Once you've got your swap functions, any time you read in a value in the wrong endian, call the appropriate swap function. Sometimes a stumbling point for people here is that single byte values do not need to be endian swapped, so if you're reading in something like a character stream that represents a string of letters from a file, that should be good to go. It's only when you're reading in a value this is multiple bytes (like an integer value) that you have to swap them.