Re: [PECL-DEV] Endianness in PHP

Hi,

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 22:43 -0700, "J. Adams" wrote:
> >> 1) Is there a standardized way or recommended best practice for conversions
> >> of ints, longs, and doubles to network byte order?
> >>     
> >
> > Usually, operating system provides functions for this.
> > Look for the following functions: htonl, htons, ntohl, ntohs
> >   
> It's my understanding that these functions aren't always available.  
> This link:

Right that is all OS dependent. Standard C doesn't provide any such
things.

What we're having is a WORDS_BIGENDIAN define which is set on big endian
machines and undefined on little endian machines. which we use in some
places to do manual conversions:
http://lxr.php.net/opengrok/search?q=&project=PHP_5_3&defs=&refs=WORDS_BIGENDIAN&path=&hist=

> >> 2) Can anyone recommend a cheap way to gain access to a Big-Endian machine
> >> for development and testing?
 
> Ugh.  I was rather hoping I could get access to a VPS somewhere, perhaps 
> through EC2 or Rackspace.com. 

They all provide x86 hardware as modern big endian gear is relatively
expensive and not what most people expect. Sun provided a test machine
though (see also private mail) while currently I can't provide accounts
there.

johannes