Question

So I was using BitConverter.GetBytes() to convert uint32 to byte[], but my the order in the array seems to be backwards.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1184xdy4.aspx
(shows that it’s byte[] seems to be little endian).

Is there a better way handle this than just using linq to reverse the byte arrays?

Answer 1

So I figured out a big part of my confusion is related to this: IsLittleEndian field reports false, but it must be Little-Endian?

What I ended up doing was wrapping all the BitConverter calls with call that took an extra parameter to specifiy endianness, then added a function that gets called to check to see if the bytes need to be revered.

public static class BitEndianConverter
{
    public static byte[] GetBytes(bool value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }

    public static byte[] GetBytes(char value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(double value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(float value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(int value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(long value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(short value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(uint value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(ulong value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(ushort value, bool littleEndian)
    {
        return ReverseAsNeeded(BitConverter.GetBytes(value), littleEndian);
    }

    private static byte[] ReverseAsNeeded(byte[] bytes, bool wantsLittleEndian)
    {
        if (wantsLittleEndian == BitConverter.IsLittleEndian)
            return bytes;
        else
            return (byte[])bytes.Reverse().ToArray();
    }
}