One thing I'm seeing: fgetc returns an int, so on a big-endian architecture the `*ptr = fgetc(src);` might yield even more interesting results. Then, that fget

One thing I'm seeing: fgetc returns an int, so on a big-endian architecture the `*ptr = fgetc(src);` might yield even more interesting results. Then, that fgetc() returns EOF on either an EOF or error is its major weakness — mixing in data and control all in-band — one is supposed to check with feof() and ferror() which of those two have happened, and if neither is true, then it's a data byte that just happens to be equal to the EOF constant. (This makes it quite pessimal when you are reading in a file that happens to contain lots of bytes equal to EOF, though). > If instead you're on a system like ARM where char is unsigned, then you can never read EOF. Then you should probably use an intermediate variable which is a proper int, gives you a surefire way to tell 0x000000ff and 0xffffffff apart. But it's all gotchas like this which make me cringe every time someone suggests C is oh so very good and "simple", or even (gasp!) "convenient" to work with strings in general and text in particular. It's anything but. Hell, maybe it was better than alternatives back in some 1976, but then awk and Perl got invented, and Python followed soon after.