Efficient way to read big endian data in C#

c# endianness binaryreader
Hossein Narimani Rad picture Hossein Narimani Rad · Jan 18, 2013 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

I use the following code to read BigEndian information using BinaryReader but I'm not sure if it is the efficient way of doing it. Is there any better solution?

Here is my code:

// some code to initialize the stream value
// set the length value to the Int32 size
BinaryReader reader =new BinaryReader(stream);
byte[] bytes = reader.ReadBytes(length);
Array.Reverse(bytes);
int result = System.BitConverter.ToInt32(temp, 0);

Answer

CodesInChaos picture CodesInChaos · Jan 18, 2013

BitConverter.ToInt32 isn't very fast in the first place. I'd simply use

public static int ToInt32BigEndian(byte[] buf, int i)
{
  return (buf[i]<<24) | (buf[i+1]<<16) | (buf[i+2]<<8) | buf[i+3];
}

You could also consider reading more than 4 bytes at a time.

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