Re: Byte ordering

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 3, 2025 at 9:54 PM James Ring <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2025 at 9:46 PM Ralph Little <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi.
>> Someone has asked the question about byte order in multi-byte image data
>> that we might get from a SANE backend. For example, if the data is 16-bit,
>> what assumptions can we make about the byte order of that data? There
>> doesn't seem to be anything in the SANE API specification for guidance.
>>
>> It is not enough to assume the local machine byte order since we may get
>> data through the net backend from a remote machine with a different byte
>> order.
>>
>
> In the case of the net backend, the byte order is indicated in the SANE_NET_START
> response <https://sane-project.gitlab.io/standard/net.html#sane-net-start>.
> The client is responsible for reordering bytes if the byte orders differ. I
> don't have any experience with other backends. :-)
>

This is interesting because it seems to *imply* that the image data from
sane_read() will be host byte order, yet we have nothing in the SANE API
specification on this topic.

Cheers,
Ralph