On 3/28/06, Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@gmail.com> wrote: When reading/writing binary streams, you often need to read/write an
(unaligned) integer in big, little or native endian. Is there support for this in Boost?
The closest thing I'm aware of is the portable_binary_oarchive (and iarchive) in the Boost.Serialization examples directory. This has logic to save integers and longs in little-endian format regardless of the hardware architecture, saving a single byte length + binary data that represents the value. For example, 42 would be saved as \x01\x2a and 1024 would be saved as \x02\x00\x04 What do other Boost developers/users use/recommend?
Wouldn't this make a nice additional to the new asio library?
Having machine word conversion logic is indeed very handy for network programming. The C library will always (?) provide the primitive hton[ls] and ntoh[ls] routines, but these are not always sufficient in today's world. Many protocols are strictly little-endian, or utilize receiver-makes-right semantics, wherein the receiver of the data converts the data to the correct format for their architecture. General purpose byte-swapping routines for varying "word" sizes (2, 4, 8, 16) are invaluable when implementing these sorts of protocols. Its not entirely clear (to me at least) where this sort of logic belongs in Boost, as it is potentially useful in more places than just a networking library. Perhaps this should be just a single header in the boost directory? -- Caleb Epstein caleb dot epstein at gmail dot com