Endianness

When reading and writing data a byte at a time, it is necessary to know the endianness of the computer you are working on.

The Unicode standard does not specifically does not require a particular endianness of text written in Unicode; both big- and little-endian encodings are allowed.

Endianness comes in two varieties: big and little.

An endianness difference can cause problems if a computer unknowingly tries to read binary data written in the opposite format from a shared memory location or file.