Thanks again keang! That worked great! A perfect and very flexible solution! Working with that ByteArrayInputStream does seem a little weird, only because I construct it by passing a completely external buffer, which I still have to manipulate (fill or modify) apart from any method provided by the class. Had I written a class that way I've feel like I violated some JAVA rule, but I guess not. In any case, this works perfectly


BTW, Yesterday someone else pointed out to me that the java.nio ByteArray class has all kinds of flexible methods for dealing with big/little endian data, and at first glance it looks like that might be the case. Not unusual for working with a new language, here I am re-inventing wheels and solving problems others seem to have already addressed. But this has still been a very useful exercise for me. And hopefully I won't find out that "nio" makes "io" classes obsolete, or that they shouldn't be used or are deprecated!