Convert big endian to little endian when reading from a binary file

Question

I've been looking around how to convert big-endian to little-endians. But I didn't find any good that could solve my problem. It seem to be there's many way you can do this conversion. Anyway this following code works ok in a big-endian system. But how should I write a conversion function so it will work on little-endian system as well?

This is a homework, but it just an extra since the systems at school running big-endian system. It's just that I got curious and wanted to make it work on my home computer also

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
   ifstream file;

   file.open("file.bin", ios::in | ios::binary);

   if(!file)
      cerr << "Not able to read" << endl;
   else
   {
      cout << "Opened" << endl;

      int i_var;
      double d_var;

      while(!file.eof())
      {
         file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&i_var) , sizeof(int) );
         file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&d_var) , sizeof(double) );
         cout << i_var << " " << d_var << endl;
      }
   }
   return 0;
}

Solved

So Big-endian VS Little-endian is just a reverse order of the bytes. This function i wrote seem to serve my purpose anyway. I added it here in case someone else would need it in future. This is for double only though, for integer either use the function torak suggested or you can modify this code by making it swap 4 bytes only.

double swap(double d)
{
   double a;
   unsigned char *dst = (unsigned char *)&a;
   unsigned char *src = (unsigned char *)&d;

   dst[0] = src[7];
   dst[1] = src[6];
   dst[2] = src[5];
   dst[3] = src[4];
   dst[4] = src[3];
   dst[5] = src[2];
   dst[6] = src[1];
   dst[7] = src[0];

   return a;
}

Answer 1

You could use a template for your endian swap that will be generalized for the data types:

#include <algorithm>

template <class T>
void endswap(T *objp)
{
  unsigned char *memp = reinterpret_cast<unsigned char*>(objp);
  std::reverse(memp, memp + sizeof(T));
}

Then your code would end up looking something like:

file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&i_var) , sizeof(int) );
endswap( &i_var );
file.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&d_var) , sizeof(double) );  
endswap( &d_var );
cout << i_var << " " << d_var << endl;