Numbers as text is indeed more portable... unless you happen to have a system that uses EBCDIC, UNICODE, etc. Enter HTML and XML, which allow you to specify the encoding. So what's simpler? Using XML, converting the ASCII to your platform's encoding, or specifying that the numbers are little-endian?

As for 'n' and 'v' being unsigned, that's why my solution above isn't as compacts as the others (but it works and it's portable!)