1.10 Byte-Ordering Issues

Occasionally you may have to deal with data that were created on a machine with a different byte order than the one on which you are running Python. A common symptom of this issue is an error like

Traceback
    ...
ValueError: Big-endian buffer not supported on little-endian compiler

To deal with this issue you should convert the underlying NumPy array to the native system byte order before passing it to Series/DataFrame/Panel constructors using something similar to the following:

In [1]: x = np.array(list(range(10)), '>i4') # big endian

In [2]: newx = x.byteswap().newbyteorder() # force native byteorder

In [3]: s = pd.Series(newx)

See the NumPy documentation on byte order for more details.