Javascript Typed Arrays and Endianness

Solution 1:

The current behaviour, is determined by the endianness of the underlying hardware. As almost all desktop computers are x86, this means little-endian. Most ARM OSes use little-endian mode (ARM processors are bi-endian and thus can operate in either).

The reason why this is somewhat sad is the fact that it means almost nobody will test whether their code works on big-endian hardware, hurting what does, and the fact that the entire web platform was designed around code working uniformly across implementations and platforms, which this breaks.

Solution 2:

FYI you can use the following javascript function to determine the endianness of the machine, after which you can pass an appropriately formatted file to the client (you can store two versions of the file on server, big endian and little endian):

function checkEndian() {
    var arrayBuffer = new ArrayBuffer(2);
    var uint8Array = new Uint8Array(arrayBuffer);
    var uint16array = new Uint16Array(arrayBuffer);
    uint8Array[0] = 0xAA; // set first byte
    uint8Array[1] = 0xBB; // set second byte
    if(uint16array[0] === 0xBBAA) return "little endian";
    if(uint16array[0] === 0xAABB) return "big endian";
    else throw new Error("Something crazy just happened");
}

In your case you will probably have to either recreate the file in little endian, or run through the entire data structure to make it little endian. Using a twist of the above method you can swap endianness on the fly (not really recommended and only makes sense if the entire structure is the same tightly packed types, in reality you can create a stub function that swaps bytes as needed):

function swapBytes(buf, size) {
    var bytes = new Uint8Array(buf);
    var len = bytes.length;
    var holder;

    if (size == 'WORD') {
        // 16 bit
        for (var i = 0; i<len; i+=2) {
            holder = bytes[i];
            bytes[i] = bytes[i+1];
            bytes[i+1] = holder;
        }
    } else if (size == 'DWORD') {
        // 32 bit
        for (var i = 0; i<len; i+=4) {
            holder = bytes[i];
            bytes[i] = bytes[i+3];
            bytes[i+3] = holder;
            holder = bytes[i+1];
            bytes[i+1] = bytes[i+2];
            bytes[i+2] = holder;
        }
    }
}