RJ
❔ Runtime Endianness for Reading Structured Binary Data
Is there a standard way to deal with reading structured binary data in from a stream where the endianness is known only at runtime? In other words, it would be great if there was something with the same API as the
BinaryReader but where the endianness for the reader could be set.
I'm pretty new to C# so I didn't know if there was a idiomatic way to do this. In go I have used the binary.Read (https://pkg.go.dev/encoding/binary#Read) API to allow for reading in primitive types while specifying the endianness. Similarly, I have used the Java ByteBuffer type (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/nio/ByteBuffer.html) to accomplish this on the JVM.
From my research, I have discovered (correct me if I'm wrong) that everything in dotnet is little endian. I have also found the BinaryPrimatives class which offers different methods for reading/writing binary primitives with different endiannesses. However, using this would require conditional statements wherever a read is performed. I wasn't sure if there was an extant class that provides a sleeker API for this. I know I could wrap it myself, but didn't want to reinvent the wheel if it was just something I missed25 replies