Converting an array of byte to an array int

Dear all,

I am using sockets in c in order to send an array of integers from the server and then receive it at the client side. Now at the client side as far as i know i will receive it as an array of bytes.

Therefore I need a way to convert this array of bytes to an array of int. Can anyone suggest any solution please?

Thank you very much,
Chris

When you send array of ints - you also end it as array of bytes.

So question is - are client and server located on the same OS or different OSes.

It means - do you need to handle big/small endian issues or not?

If you sending from/to same OS like from XP to XP - no worries - just read input into array of ints direclty

If not... It should be taken into account also while sending array

if you don't know what your doing you might want to read up on network programming in general.

Dear all,

thanks for your replies.

My query however is the following...

I have read all my data in an array of bytes. I have no problem in doing that. The problem is that now I need to convert that array of bytes to an array of integers therefore in some way I want to tae 4 bytes at a time in order to represent each int.

Can someone suggest a solutions?

Thanks a lot,
Chris Farrugia

Depends on whether you care about the byte-ordering or not. If you have equivalent hardware at both ends (e.g. two PC's ) you certainly OK to ignore endianness. If you have different hardware (e.g. Sun Sparc connected to a PC), then you will need to make sure that the bytes appear in the right order when you receive the data.

If byteorder is not important, then something like this will most likely work:

Code:

---

  int *intptr;
  char *bytedata;

  bytedata = received_data_array;

  if (((unsigned long) bytedata) & (sizeof(int)-1))
      error("Must align data correctly first");
  intptr = (int *)bytedata;

---

--
Mats

Thank you very much for your reply,

If the platforms are different do you suggest make use of the htonl function? If yes can you suggest how to use it?

Thanks,
Chris

Excuse me for my previous reply, I mean ntohl not htonl.

Thanks

Actually ntohl and htonl do exactly the same...

But generally - if you can have different platforms on sender and received you have to call

ntohl before you send an int to convert it to byte array
and htonl after you receive to convert byte array back to int

These calls have to be made for each int to be sent/receved