Little and Big Endian

 Little and big endian are two ways of storing multibyte data-types.

Suppose integer is stored as 4 bytes then a variable x with value 0x01234567 will be stored as following in Big Endian

Big Endian:

  01,                   23,                45,             67

 0x100             0x101            0x102         0x103

Little Endian

 67,                   45,                23,             01

 0x100             0x101            0x102         0x103

Sample C program to check this.,

int main() 

{ 

    unsigned int i = 1; 

    char *c = (char*)&i; 

    if (*c) 

        cout<<"Little endian"; 

    else

        cout<<"Big endian"; 

    return 0; 

}