Hi Mark, No easy way, on this one. If your program uses a canonical data format, and it's already taken care . For example, writing a 16-bit or 32-bit number out with htons and htonl (respectively), and reading them in with ntohs and ntohl will give a consistent canonical binary format. If your application does the same, then the binary format shouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, in my experience, many C/C++ programmers will write a structure out blindly, such as "fwrite(myStruct, sizeof myStruct, 1, fp);" which doesn't adjucate the 16-bit and 32-bit numbers into a canonical format (such as the aforementioned network byte order), and also includes any padding bytes which will often vary from platform to platform. A "platform" being both the OS and the compiler, in this case. Serializing output and marshalling input are important, yet often overlooked issue. Sincerely, --Eljay
