I'm working on a program where I store some data in an integer and process it bitwise. For example, I might receive the number 48, which I will process bit-by-bit. In general the endianness of integers depends on the machine representation of integers, but does Python do anything to guarantee that the ints will always be little-endian? Or do I need to check endianness like I would in C and then write separate code for the two cases? Show I ask because my code runs on a Sun machine and, although the one it's running on now uses Intel processors, I might have to switch to a machine with Sun processors in the future, which I know is big-endian. asked Sep 9, 2009 at 14:20
Python's This is byte-by-byte, not bit-by-bit; not sure exactly what you mean by bit-by-bit processing in this context, but I assume it can be accomodated similarly. For fast "bulk" processing in simple cases, consider also the array module -- the answered Sep 9, 2009 at 14:23
Alex MartelliAlex Martelli 823k163 gold badges1202 silver badges1379 bronze badges 2 If you need to process your data 'bitwise' then the The
To check the endianness of the platform programmatically you can use
which will either return answered Sep 9, 2009 at 14:27
Scott GriffithsScott Griffiths 20.9k8 gold badges54 silver badges84 bronze badges 2 The following snippet will tell you if your system default is little endian (otherwise it is big-endian)
Note, however, this will not affect
the behavior of bitwise operators: answered Dec 12, 2013 at 5:18
Check when? When doing bitwise operations, the int in will have the same endianess as the ints you put in. You don't need to check that. You only need to care about this when converting to/from sequences of bytes, in both languages, afaik. In Python you use the struct module for this, most commonly struct.pack() and struct.unpack(). answered Sep 9, 2009 at 14:28
Lennart RegebroLennart Regebro 161k41 gold badges221 silver badges251 bronze badges 3 What is Byteorder in Python?The byteorder argument determines the byte order used to represent the integer. If byteorder is "big" , the most significant byte is at the beginning of the byte array. If byteorder is "little" , the most significant byte is at the end of the byte array.
What systems use little endian?The following platforms are considered little endian: VAX/VMS, AXP/VMS, Digital UNIX, Intel ABI, OS/2, and Windows. On big endian platforms, the value 1 is stored in binary and is represented here in hexadecimal notation. One byte is stored as 01, two bytes as 00 01, and four bytes as 00 00 00 01.
Is Windows 10 big or little endian?All versions of Windows that you'll see are little-endian, yes.
What is the difference between little endianness and big endianness?Big-endian is an order in which the "big end" (most significant value in the sequence) is stored first, at the lowest storage address. Little-endian is an order in which the "little end" (least significant value in the sequence) is stored first.
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