1.3.4 Byte Ordering

Data in address book file records are stored in little-endian format.

Some computer architectures number bytes in a binary word from left to right, which is referred to as big-endian. The bit diagram for this documentation is big-endian. Other architectures number the bytes in a binary word from right to left, which is referred to as little-endian. The underlying file format enumerations, objects and records are little-endian.

Using the big-endian and little-endian methods, the number 0x12345678 would be stored as shown in the following table.

Byte order	Byte 0	Byte 1	Byte 2	Byte 3
big-endian	0x12	0x34	0x56	0x78
little-endian	0x78	0x56	0x34	0x12