Detecting endianness programmatically in a C++ pro

Question

Is there a programmatic way to detect whether or not you are on a big-endian or little-endian architecture? I need to be able to write code that will execute on an Intel or PPC system and use exactly the same code (i.e. no conditional compilation).

Answer 1

How about this?

#include <cstdio>

int main()
{
    unsigned int n = 1;
    char *p = 0;

    p = (char*)&n;
    if (*p == 1)
        std::printf("Little Endian\n");
    else 
        if (*(p + sizeof(int) - 1) == 1)
            std::printf("Big Endian\n");
        else
            std::printf("What the crap?\n");
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

The way C compilers (at least everyone I know of) work the endianness has to be decided at compile time. Even for biendian processors (like ARM och MIPS) you have to choose endianness at compile time. Further more the endianness is defined in all common file formats for executables (such as ELF). Although it is possible to craft a binary blob of biandian code (for some ARM server exploit maybe?) it probably has to be done in assembly.

Answer 3

See Endianness - C-Level Code illustration.

// assuming target architecture is 32-bit = 4-Bytes
enum ENDIANESS{ LITTLEENDIAN , BIGENDIAN , UNHANDLE };


ENDIANESS CheckArchEndianalityV1( void )
{
    int Endian = 0x00000001; // assuming target architecture is 32-bit    

    // as Endian = 0x00000001 so MSB (Most Significant Byte) = 0x00 and LSB (Least     Significant Byte) = 0x01
    // casting down to a single byte value LSB discarding higher bytes    

    return (*(char *) &Endian == 0x01) ? LITTLEENDIAN : BIGENDIAN;
} 

Answer 4

Here's another C version. It defines a macro called wicked_cast() for inline type punning via C99 union literals and the non-standard __typeof__ operator.

#include <limits.h>

#if UCHAR_MAX == UINT_MAX
#error endianness irrelevant as sizeof(int) == 1
#endif

#define wicked_cast(TYPE, VALUE) \
    (((union { __typeof__(VALUE) src; TYPE dest; }){ .src = VALUE }).dest)

_Bool is_little_endian(void)
{
    return wicked_cast(unsigned char, 1u);
}

If integers are single-byte values, endianness makes no sense and a compile-time error will be generated.

Answer 5

You can do it by setting an int and masking off bits, but probably the easiest way is just to use the built in network byte conversion ops (since network byte order is always big endian).

if ( htonl(47) == 47 ) {
  // Big endian
} else {
  // Little endian.
}

Bit fiddling could be faster, but this way is simple, straightforward and pretty impossible to mess up.