On Thursday, 15 February 2018 at 18:30:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, February 15, 2018 17:53:54 Kyle via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
>> I want to be able to pass an int to a function, then in the function ensure that the int is little-endian (whether it starts out that way or needs to be converted) before additional stuff is done to the passed int. The end goal is compliance with a remote console protocol that expects a little-endian 32-bit signed integer as part of a packet.
>
> Well, in the general case, you can't actually test whether an integer is little endian or not, though if you know that it's only allowed to be within a specific range of values, I suppose that you could infer which it is. And normally, whether a value is little endian or big endian is supposed to be well-defined by where it's used, but if you do have some rare case where that's not true, then it could interesting. That's why UTF-16 files are supposed to have BOMs.
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> Either way, there's nothing in std.bitmanip geared towards guessing the endianness of an integral value. It's all based on the idea that an integral value is in the native endianness of the system and that the application knows whether a ubyte[n] contains bytes arranged as little endian or big endian.
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> - Jonathan M Davis

I was thinking that the client could determine its own endianness and either convert the passed int to the other if big, or leave it alone if little, then send it to the server as little-endian at that point. Regardless, I just came across a vibe packaged RCON library by Benjamin Schaaf that may work for me, so that's the new plan, for now. All you guys helping people on the forums daily are awesome, it's still amazing to me that I can ask questions here and routinely get answers directly from core language contributors and D book authors. Thanks for what you do.

On Thursday, February 15, 2018 18:47:16 Kyle via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> I was thinking that the client could determine its own endianness and either convert the passed int to the other if big, or leave it alone if little, then send it to the server as little-endian at that point.

nativeToBigEndian and nativeToLittleEndian convert integral values to the target endianness, taking the native endianness into account. So, if what you want to do is take an int and convert it to ubyte[4], then both of those functions will do that for you. It's just a question of what the target endianness is either. Either way, the endianness of the machine itself will be properly taken into account when that conversion is done, and you don't have to worry about it.

- Jonathan M Davis