One little endian question

[Jeff Harrison]

I have a routine that I developed to convert 2 binary
bytes of data from filepro's key header into a date
that filepro can understand.  I know that sounds
strange, but this is needed, I think, since I'm using
an alien filepro file to map to a key file in order to
check  for data integrity issues.

My routine is shown below - I will feed it the "1st"
byte of the date in the x field, and the "2nd" one in
the y field.

::dt1 = base(asc(x),"10","16"):
::dt2 = base(asc(y),"10","16"):
::longago = "01/01/1983":
::thedate = longago + base(dt1&dt2,"16","10"):

::'...:
::declare dt1(2):
::declare dt2(2):
::declare longago(10,mdyy/):
::declare thedate(10,mdyy/):

As you may know, there is an endian issue with certain
flavours of filepro running on certain boxes, where
the binary order is reversed - I'm assuming all I will
need to do in those cases is reverse dt1 and dt2 bytes
in my "thedate" assignment.

The question is, though, how will I know when I need
to do the reversal?  Are there certain known values
for @os where it is one way or the other?  Or is there
a better way to do this?


Jeff Harrison
jeffaharrison at yahoo.com

Author of JHExport and JHImport.  The fastest and
easiest ways to generate filepro exports and imports.



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