How can I tell if a ctypes integer type is big endian?

Question

Consider the following:

le = ctypes.c_uint32.__ctype_le__
be = ctypes.c_uint16.__ctype_be__

How can I write a function is_bigendian(cls) that behaves as you would expect:

>>> is_bigendian(le)
False
>>> is_bigendian(be)
True

Does ctypes expose this information somewhere?

Answer 1

It seems the only possible way is:

if ctypes.c_uint8.__ctype_be__.__name__.endswith('_be'):
    def is_bigendian(cls):
        return cls.__name__.endswith('_be')
elif ctypes.c_uint8.__ctype_le__.__name__.endswith('_le'):
    def is_bigendian(cls):
        return not cls.__name__.endswith('_le')
else:
    raise RuntimeError

Which is hard to spot, because repr(ctypes.c_uint8.__ctype_be__) doesn't show the class name correctly.