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SAP Note 552464 - What is Big Endian / Little Endian? What Endian do I have?

Note Language: English Version: 13 Validity: Valid Since 08/08/2007

Summary

Symptom --additional information only--

Other termsUnicode, UTF-16, 4102, 4103, MSB, LSB

Reason and Prerequisites

Solution

Big Endian:the most significant byte is stored in memory at the lowest address, and

the least significant byte at the highest address. (The big end comesfirst.) As an analogy, we say "twenty-four" in English; the moresignificant number, twenty, comes first.This is also called most significant byte (MSB) ordering.

Little Endian:the least significant byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowestaddress, and the most significant byte at the highest address. (The littleend comes first.) As an analogy, we say "fourteen" in English; the lesssignificant number, four, comes first.This is also called least significant byte (LSB) ordering.

For example, 0xAABBCCDD would be stored as follows:

+--------------------------------------+ | Address | Big-Endian | Little-Endian | |--------------------------------------| | 3 | DD | AA | | 2 | CC | BB | | 1 | BB | CC | | 0 | AA | DD | +--------------------------------------+

When converting to Unicode, the export code page must correspond tothe endianness of the target system. More exactly speaking, the export codepage should correspond to the endianess of the machine where the R3loadimport processes will run.

4103 Little Endian Alpha, Intel X86 (and clones), X86_64, Itanium (Windows+Linux), Solaris_X86_644102 Big Endian IBM 390, AS/400, PowerPC (AIX), Linux on zSeries (S/390), Linux on Power, Solaris_SPARC, HP PA-RISC, Itanium (HP-UX)

To determine the processor architecture on Unix systems the command unamegives information. Please match this with one of the endianness classes



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above. Note that:

o some Operating Systems run on different architectures.

o the uname options giving platform information differ betweenUnices.

o different platforms may employ the same processor architecture withdifferent endianness; Itanium is an example, cf the list above.

Here are some examples:

uname uname option outputAIX -p powerpcHP-UX -m 9000/... , i.e.PA-RISCHP-UX -m ia64Linux -m i686Linux -p x86_64

Linux -p ia64Linux -p ppc64Linux -p s390xOS/390OSF/1 -p alphaSunOS -p sparcSunOS -p i86pc

Header DataRelease Status: Released for Customer

Released on: 08/09/2007 13:01:04Master Language: EnglishPriority: Recommendations/additional infoCategory: FAQPrimary Component: BC Basis Components

The Note is release-independent

Related Notes



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Number Short Text1416999 AMON: Short dump when displaying a saved alert situation

1319517 Unicode Collection Note

1310720 Collection Note for Unicode Systems with different endianess

1014782 FAQ: MaxDB system copy

971646 6.40 Patch Collection Hom./Het.System Copy ABAP

882865 CCR: Incorrect results when using parallel processing

784931 Hom./Het.System Copy SAP Web AS 6.40 SR1 ABAP

780363 Delta queue serialization does not work

548016 Conversion to Unicode

129352 Homogeneous system copy with MaxDB (SAP DB)

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Bigindian Littleindian Sapnote 0000552464