A C implementation of a platform independent endian safe binary stream that can save primitive types and is easily extendable. The data is always written as little endian encoded (since most platforms are little-endian based) independent of the endianess of the platform that is running the code. This ensures interoperability between systems of different endianess.

The implementation is template based and can be used for different kind of streams (not only std::fstream), as long as they support some of the basic operations that are required.

The sources require the C 17 standard due to the filesystem header and some minor things. This can easily be changed if you require compatibility to previous standards.

The easiest way is copying the source file (EndianSafeBinaryStream.hpp) to your project and include it where you need it in your other source files.

See the example.cpp file of this repository. To compile and run the example yourself, just run make compile and then make run. To clean any files created by this process run make clean.

There are currently two default extensions for writing/reading std::vector and std::string. You can turn them off by removing the ENDIAN_SAFE_BINARY_STREAM_DEFAULT_EXTENSIONS define from the top of the EndianSafeBinaryStream.hpp file. By default they are turned on. You can also write your own extensions as shown in the example.cpp file.

For reading from or writing to a file the implementation provides two helper functions that can be turned off by removing the ENDIAN_SAFE_BINARY_STREAM_FSTREAM_HELPER define from the top of the EndianSafeBinaryStream.hpp file. By default they are turned on.

See the LICENSE file.