host to network double?

Question

I\'d like to send some double precision floating point numbers over the network. (standard C, standard sockets) There is no htond or ntohd to convert the data to and from ne

Answer 1

You might want to look at XDR which was first defined in rfc1014. Obviously, you want to find a library which implements XDR for your platform.

Answer 2

Convert it to an agreed string format and send that. Not sure if it's common practice or even decent, but it worked for me (it is true I did not care about performance at that point since I wasn't sending very many values).

Answer 3

What Andre is saying is that binary floating point numbers are not trustworthy across networks because of differences between different computer architectures. Differences that go beyond byte order (big/little endian). Thus things like converting to strings or use of libraries such as XDR, is really necessary if there is any chance your data is going to be processed by different computer architectures.

The simple formats of integers and characters can slip through with just endian adjustments but floating point gets more complex.