# Why does little endian apply to numbers and not to text strings?

The Portable Executable file format is the format that Windows EXE files use.

It is a binary format.

Numbers are in little endian form. Thus, the following hex represents the decimal number 256, not 1.

00 01


Some fields in the file format represent text strings. For example, the "Name" field contains a null-terminated string that has up to 8 characters. Here are the hex bytes for a name and in parentheses the corresponding string:

2E 64 61 74 61 00 00 00 (.data)


My question is this: The file's byte order is little endian and therefore the bytes in a number are interpreted from right-to-left. Why aren't the bytes in a string interpreted right-to-left? Why aren't the bytes for the above string this:

00 00 00 63 74 61 64 2E


Notice that I reversed the order of the bytes. That's not how it is in EXE files, but why not? Why does "little endian" apply only to numbers and not to text strings?

• Little endian only makes sense for fixed width fields. – Yuval Filmus Jan 21 '19 at 15:56
• Hi @Yuval Filmus. The Name field that I mentioned is a fixed-width field -- exactly 8 bytes. So, shouldn't little endian make sense for that field? – Roger Costello Jan 21 '19 at 16:55