I've written up a page about how to convert native binary data to another platform's native binary data, as I did some fortran data conversions for a client.
The programs and documentation are at: http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/converting-binary.html So far, the page includes a variety of programs written in C or python to do: 1) A program for determining if your machine is big endian, little endian, or something else 2) A program for swapping big endian to little endian, or vice versa, on words of an arbitrary number of bytes, assuming a homogeneous size for all items in the file 3) A pair of programs for converting a series of reals/floats to ascii and back again (to be used in combination with ssh, rsh, &c) 4) An example program that converts binary data with variable length records 5) A program that removes fortran record framing for big endian or little endian, with arbitrary word size (must bew a multiple of 8 bits) The documentation includes: 1) A taxonomy of three different kinds of conversions 2) Tips for determining record lengths 3) An admonition to reject these methods, and instead convert to a platform-independent representation. A list of common platform-independent representations is given. I hope someone will find this useful. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
