c++endianness

Converting float values from big endian to little endian

Is it possible to convert floats from big to little endian? I have a big endian value from a PowerPC platform that I am sendING via TCP to a Windows process (little endian). This value is a float, but when I memcpy the value into a Win32 float type and then call _byteswap_ulongon that value, I always get 0.0000?

What am I doing wrong?

Solution

  • simply reverse the four bytes works

    float ReverseFloat( const float inFloat )
{
   float retVal;
   char *floatToConvert = ( char* ) & inFloat;
   char *returnFloat = ( char* ) & retVal;

   // swap the bytes into a temporary buffer
   returnFloat[0] = floatToConvert[3];
   returnFloat[1] = floatToConvert[2];
   returnFloat[2] = floatToConvert[1];
   returnFloat[3] = floatToConvert[0];

   return retVal;
}