How do I convert between big-endian and little-endian values in C++?

Question

How do I convert between big-endian and little-endian values in C++?

EDIT: For clarity, I have to translate binary data (double-precision floating point values and 3

Answer 1

Here's how to read a double stored in IEEE 754 64 bit format, even if your host computer uses a different system.

/*
* read a double from a stream in ieee754 format regardless of host
*  encoding.
*  fp - the stream
*  bigendian - set to if big bytes first, clear for little bytes
*              first
*
*/
double freadieee754(FILE *fp, int bigendian)
{
    unsigned char buff[8];
    int i;
    double fnorm = 0.0;
    unsigned char temp;
    int sign;
    int exponent;
    double bitval;
    int maski, mask;
    int expbits = 11;
    int significandbits = 52;
    int shift;
    double answer;

    /* read the data */
    for (i = 0; i < 8; i++)
        buff[i] = fgetc(fp);
    /* just reverse if not big-endian*/
    if (!bigendian)
    {
        for (i = 0; i < 4; i++)
        {
            temp = buff[i];
            buff[i] = buff[8 - i - 1];
            buff[8 - i - 1] = temp;
        }
    }
    sign = buff[0] & 0x80 ? -1 : 1;
    /* exponet in raw format*/
    exponent = ((buff[0] & 0x7F) << 4) | ((buff[1] & 0xF0) >> 4);

    /* read inthe mantissa. Top bit is 0.5, the successive bits half*/
    bitval = 0.5;
    maski = 1;
    mask = 0x08;
    for (i = 0; i < significandbits; i++)
    {
        if (buff[maski] & mask)
            fnorm += bitval;

        bitval /= 2.0;
        mask >>= 1;
        if (mask == 0)
        {
            mask = 0x80;
            maski++;
        }
    }
    /* handle zero specially */
    if (exponent == 0 && fnorm == 0)
        return 0.0;

    shift = exponent - ((1 << (expbits - 1)) - 1); /* exponent = shift + bias */
    /* nans have exp 1024 and non-zero mantissa */
    if (shift == 1024 && fnorm != 0)
        return sqrt(-1.0);
    /*infinity*/
    if (shift == 1024 && fnorm == 0)
    {

#ifdef INFINITY
        return sign == 1 ? INFINITY : -INFINITY;
#endif
        return  (sign * 1.0) / 0.0;
    }
    if (shift > -1023)
    {
        answer = ldexp(fnorm + 1.0, shift);
        return answer * sign;
    }
    else
    {
        /* denormalised numbers */
        if (fnorm == 0.0)
            return 0.0;
        shift = -1022;
        while (fnorm < 1.0)
        {
            fnorm *= 2;
            shift--;
        }
        answer = ldexp(fnorm, shift);
        return answer * sign;
    }
}

For the rest of the suite of functions, including the write and the integer routines see my github project

https://github.com/MalcolmMcLean/ieee754

Answer 2

i like this one, just for style :-)

long swap(long i) {
    char *c = (char *) &i;
    return * (long *) (char[]) {c[3], c[2], c[1], c[0] };
}

Answer 3

There is an assembly instruction called BSWAP that will do the swap for you, extremely fast. You can read about it here.

Visual Studio, or more precisely the Visual C++ runtime library, has platform intrinsics for this, called _byteswap_ushort(), _byteswap_ulong(), and _byteswap_int64(). Similar should exist for other platforms, but I'm not aware of what they would be called.

Answer 4

Seriously... I don't understand why all solutions are that complicated! How about the simplest, most general template function that swaps any type of any size under any circumstances in any operating system????

template <typename T>
void SwapEnd(T& var)
{
    static_assert(std::is_pod<T>::value, "Type must be POD type for safety");
    std::array<char, sizeof(T)> varArray;
    std::memcpy(varArray.data(), &var, sizeof(T));
    for(int i = 0; i < static_cast<int>(sizeof(var)/2); i++)
        std::swap(varArray[sizeof(var) - 1 - i],varArray[i]);
    std::memcpy(&var, varArray.data(), sizeof(T));
}

It's the magic power of C and C++ together! Simply swap the original variable character by character.

Point 1: No operators: Remember that I didn't use the simple assignment operator "=" because some objects will be messed up when the endianness is flipped and the copy constructor (or assignment operator) won't work. Therefore, it's more reliable to copy them char by char.

Point 2: Be aware of alignment issues: Notice that we're copying to and from an array, which is the right thing to do because the C++ compiler doesn't guarantee that we can access unaligned memory (this answer was updated from its original form for this). For example, if you allocate uint64_t, your compiler cannot guarantee that you can access the 3rd byte of that as a uint8_t. Therefore, the right thing to do is to copy this to a char array, swap it, then copy it back (so no reinterpret_cast). Notice that compilers are mostly smart enough to convert what you did back to a reinterpret_cast if they're capable of accessing individual bytes regardless of alignment.

To use this function:

double x = 5;
SwapEnd(x);

and now x is different in endianness.

Answer 5

Seems like the safe way would be to use htons on each word. So, if you have...

std::vector<uint16_t> storage(n);  // where n is the number to be converted

// the following would do the trick
std::transform(word_storage.cbegin(), word_storage.cend()
  , word_storage.begin(), [](const uint16_t input)->uint16_t {
  return htons(input); });

The above would be a no-op if you were on a big-endian system, so I would look for whatever your platform uses as a compile-time condition to decide whether htons is a no-op. It is O(n) after all. On a Mac, it would be something like ...

#if (__DARWIN_BYTE_ORDER != __DARWIN_BIG_ENDIAN)
std::transform(word_storage.cbegin(), word_storage.cend()
  , word_storage.begin(), [](const uint16_t input)->uint16_t {
  return htons(input); });
#endif

Answer 6

Most platforms have a system header file that provides efficient byteswap functions. On Linux it is in <endian.h>. You can wrap it nicely in C++:

#include <iostream>

#include <endian.h>

template<size_t N> struct SizeT {};

#define BYTESWAPS(bits) \
template<class T> inline T htobe(T t, SizeT<bits / 8>) { return htobe ## bits(t); } \
template<class T> inline T htole(T t, SizeT<bits / 8>) { return htole ## bits(t); } \
template<class T> inline T betoh(T t, SizeT<bits / 8>) { return be ## bits ## toh(t); } \
template<class T> inline T letoh(T t, SizeT<bits / 8>) { return le ## bits ## toh(t); }

BYTESWAPS(16)
BYTESWAPS(32)
BYTESWAPS(64)

#undef BYTESWAPS

template<class T> inline T htobe(T t) { return htobe(t, SizeT<sizeof t>()); }
template<class T> inline T htole(T t) { return htole(t, SizeT<sizeof t>()); }
template<class T> inline T betoh(T t) { return betoh(t, SizeT<sizeof t>()); }
template<class T> inline T letoh(T t) { return letoh(t, SizeT<sizeof t>()); }

int main()
{
    std::cout << std::hex;
    std::cout << htobe(static_cast<unsigned short>(0xfeca)) << '\n';
    std::cout << htobe(0xafbeadde) << '\n';

    // Use ULL suffix to specify integer constant as unsigned long long 
    std::cout << htobe(0xfecaefbeafdeedfeULL) << '\n';
}

Output:

cafe
deadbeaf
feeddeafbeefcafe