I am playing with the Unix hexdump utility. My input file is UTF-8 encoded, containing a single character ñ, which is C3 B1 in hexadecimal UTF-8.
hexdump test.txt
0000000 b1c3
0000002
Huh? This shows B1 C3 - the inverse of what I expected! Can someone explain?
For getting the expected output I do:
hexdump -C test.txt
00000000 c3 b1 |..|
00000002
I was thinking I understood encoding systems.
Answer
This is because hexdump defaults to using 16-bit words and you are running on a little-endian architecture. The byte sequence b1 c3 is thus interpreted as the hex word c3b1. The -C option forces hexdump to work with bytes instead of words.