What is the difference between little endian and big endian format

Big Endian Byte Order: The most significant byte the "big end" of the data is placed at the byte with the lowest address. The rest of the data is placed in order in the next three bytes in memory. Little Endian Byte Order: The least significant byte the "little end" of the data is placed at the byte with the lowest address.

In these definitions, the data, a bit pattern, is regarded as a bit unsigned integer. The "most significant" byte is the one for the largest powers of two: 2 31 , The "least significant" byte is the one for the smallest powers of two: 2 7 , The big endian format means that data is stored big end first.

In multiple bytes, the first byte is the biggest, or represents the primary value. In the little endian format, data is stored little end first. In this case, with multi-byte pieces, it is the last bite that is biggest or that has the primary value to which subsequent values are added or concatenated. Developers can use various fixes to resolve big endian and little endian data issues.

There are various administrative options to fix this problem, but there is also the use of something called a byte order mark BOM. This hexadecimal representation can ensure that data is stored in the right format. In addition, professionals might discuss whether endian-ness is "transparent" across a system, for example, where constructed format tags or other resources could help in planning or design.

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High-Performance Cloud Computing. This means that in order for you to use the Internet, your computer has to account for the difference in endianness. As a reminder, little-endianness refers to the byte ordering where the least significant byte is stored first. So for example, if we have the 8-byte value of 0xabcdef0 we would store it in memory in the following way.

Note: I put a pseudo memory address next to the values, this is so we can say that this value is at memory address 0x The most important thing to understand here is that we are storing an 8-byte value. On the other hand, if we were storing a 4-byte value, we would still flip the byte order, but just for those 4 bytes.

Take the following array as an example. This array, like the 8-byte number, takes up 8 total bytes and looks very similar. However, in memory, we would not store the same thing as above, but instead the following:.

Notice here how the order of the array is preserved and that the 0x value individually the first 4 bytes is in little-endian. Now, if we bring this back to big-endian, we can see that every one of these examples is stored in the same way. This is because big-endian is stored in the order that you see things. I would recommend proving this for yourself.

However counter-intuitive it might seem at first, there are valid reasons why little-endian is used over big-endian. The reason for the widespread use of little-endian is not because of the ease of user understanding as you might have figured out , but rather for ease of the computer. We will use this 8-byte value 0x When we store it in little-endian we have the following.

We are doing something called a pointer down cast.