Note that each 2 hex letters represent 1 byte. In the end, that is why endianness is important; because not knowing how data is stored would lead to communicating different values. 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. 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 , For example, say that the bit pattern 0x is stored at address 0x However, a program may need to process external input , such as a file format that stores data with a different endianness.
In this case, the data must be converted from little-endian to big-endian or vice versa. Converting endianness is not as simple as reversing the data. The bytes , rather than the bits , must be reversed. In other words, each byte or block of eight bits must remain the same, but the order of the bytes is changed.
This can be explained using the hexadecimal or binary representation of data. Converting this data to little-endian does not reverse the data, but rather the individual bytes within the data.
Hexadecimal uses two digits to represent each byte — [A1][B2], while binary uses eight digits — [][]. NOTE: Some processors can fetch data as either big-endian or little-endian with no conversion required. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Gorilla Glass. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us.
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