library to serialize numbers across programing language and machine [closed]

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I have a program in Java that needs to write a file with integers of 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits and floating point numbers of 16, 32 and 64 bits. This file needs to be read by a program in C (and vice-versa). These programs are used in different type of machines, so the file needs to be independent of little or big endian.

I am looking for a library in Java and in C for doing this. The library needs to be compact, because this will be used also in a micro-controller.

note: At the moment, I am implementing the functions myself, and it works fine (so, no need to give me an ad-hoc solution). note: I am aware that I could write the numbers in a human readable format, and use scanf to read them; I pr开发者_如何转开发efer not to use this solution now, because it is slower and takes more place.

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Google's Protocol Buffers seem like what you're after.

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On the Java side, you can just use DataOutputStream, it's guaranteed to use big endian format aka network byte order. On the C side, you can use the ntohl() and ntohs() functions to convert network byte order to host byte order.

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One possibility would be to use Sun's XDR format. Oddly, I don't believe Java ships with support for it, but if you look around, it's easy to find. Sun does include an XDR library with Solaris; if you're not using Solaris, it's easy to find implementations for C as well.