Endianness and web server

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I'm learning socket programming and I can't understand where the endianness principle is applied. I'm making a simple web server that communicates via HTTP/1.1. I found that generally no need to worry about endian issues in HTTP/1.1. But in HTTP/2 I must worry since it uses binary elements.

In case of HTTP2, should I check the type of client I'm communicating with? In order to send the data with the good endian type?

Let me know if the question is not clear.

Many thanks.

endianness webserver sockets http
1 Answers

A server does not need to know what endian is used on clients. Network protocols that use binary data always specify what endian is transferred over network. For example HTTP/2 RFC-7540 says

All numeric values are in network byte order.

The TCP/IP standard network byte order is big-endian. So all numbers should be big-endian and server must convert them to big-endian. A client must assume everything received is big-endian and convert it to native representation.

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