CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cendianness
Goaler444
Goaler444

Reputation: 2621

Is there need to convert byte order for strings?

Is there need to convert to network/host byte ordering when sending and receiving strings. The available functions (such as htons()) only work with 16 and 32 bit integers. I also know for a fact that a single char shouldn't make a difference, as generally, it is a byte large. However what about strings ?

The following is a code snippet

 int len; recv(fd, &len, sizeof (int), 0); 
 len = ntohl(len);

 char* string = malloc(sizeof (char) * (len + 1)); 
 int received = recv(fd, string, sizeof (char) * len, 0); 
 string[len] = '\0';

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5742

Answers (2)

mah
mah

Reputation: 39797

C strings are simply an array of one byte values with a convention of a one byte special value to terminate them, thus there is nothing to swap. Shorts and ints are multiple byte values which get stored differently according to the hardware requirements, thus the need to normalize their storage order across the network (in case the receiver has a different hardware architecture).

Upvotes: 5

unwind
unwind

Reputation: 399703

It depends on the encoding of the string.

If it's a byte-oriented format (plain old ASCII or UTF-8), then it doesn't matter.

If it uses "code points" larger than a single byte, then yes it matters.

Upvotes: 9

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