I am trying to read an unformatted binary file, that was written by a big endian machine. My machine is a 32bit little endian. I already know how to swap bytes for different variable types, but it is a cumbersome work. I found this set of functions endian.h that handle integer swapping very easily. I was wondering if there is something similar for floats or strings, or if I have to program it from scratch? Since they are handled differently for this endianness problem as integers. Thanks.
I do not think there is a standart header for swapping floats. You could take a look at http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/writing-endian-independent-code-in-c-r2091 which provides some helpful code.
As for strings, there is no need to do endian-swapping. Endianness is used to order the bytes of a variable. A string consists of a series of chars. Each char has only one Byte so there is nothing to swap.