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Checking Endianness

Understand how to detect system endianness using pointer techniques in C. This lesson helps you identify whether a system uses little-endian or big-endian memory storage to ensure your code remains portable and compatible across different architectures.

Introduction

Recall that code that exploits a particular endianness format is not compatible with code written for systems with a different endianness format.

Therefore, to make our code portable, we may want to detect the endianness of a system and support both formats.

That said, we need to know how we can detect the endianness format of the current system.

Memory layout

Let’s consider the integer in ...