Question

Lazy programmer alert. 🙂

Cassandra stores column values as bytes (Java example). Specifying a LongType comparator compares those bytes as a long. I want the value of a long into a Cassandra-friendly byte[]. How? I poked around for awhile. I think you people can help me faster.

EDIT:

Both Alexander and Eli’s answers agreed with this reverse transformation. Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is cut and paste from java 6 DataOutputStream.writeLong

public final void writeLong(long v) throws IOException {
    writeBuffer[0] = (byte)(v >>> 56);
    writeBuffer[1] = (byte)(v >>> 48);
    writeBuffer[2] = (byte)(v >>> 40);
    writeBuffer[3] = (byte)(v >>> 32);
    writeBuffer[4] = (byte)(v >>> 24);
    writeBuffer[5] = (byte)(v >>> 16);
    writeBuffer[6] = (byte)(v >>>  8);
    writeBuffer[7] = (byte)(v >>>  0);
    out.write(writeBuffer, 0, 8);
incCount(8);
}

Here are modifications for your case

public final byte[] longToBytes(long v) {
    byte[] writeBuffer = new byte[ 8 ];

    writeBuffer[0] = (byte)(v >>> 56);
    writeBuffer[1] = (byte)(v >>> 48);
    writeBuffer[2] = (byte)(v >>> 40);
    writeBuffer[3] = (byte)(v >>> 32);
    writeBuffer[4] = (byte)(v >>> 24);
    writeBuffer[5] = (byte)(v >>> 16);
    writeBuffer[6] = (byte)(v >>>  8);
    writeBuffer[7] = (byte)(v >>>  0);

    return writeBuffer;
}