Endianness

• Endianness is the ordering of bytes within multi-byte data types
• In big-endian, the most significant byte is stored at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte is stored at the largest memory address.
• In little-endian, the least significant byte is stored at the smallest memory address and the most significant byte is stored at the largest memory address.
• Typically larger machines have been big-endian, while intel based machines are little-endian
• Network order is big-endian
• Endianness affects all multi-byte data types. I.e. long, long long, int, short, double, float
• Endianness typically does not affect strings of ASCII characters. As strings are usually arrays of single byte characters.

See Also

• Sockets - Byte Order