Byte[] to long

Question

I'm writing an app that needs to deliver data to different places based on source and destination IP addresses. I was thinking that I could do this by stuffing the bits of both addresses into a long (source followed by destination) and then making a binary tree out of them.
Assuming I can get the addresses as byte arrays, would doing this:
long getAddresses(){
byte[] source=getSource();
byte[] dest=getDest();
long addresses= source[0]|source[1]|......source[7]|dest[0]|dest[1]|.....dest[7]; //pardon the paraphrasing
return addresses;
be the best way to go about things? I don't really care about the value of the longs, I only need to be able to compare them against each other and be sure that all pairs of addresses will produce a unique value, and as quickly as possible, since I need to handle lots of them.
Thanks for any advice.
Ewan

Answer 1

Well, if you don't really care obout the actual long values, a little byte-collecting
helper function will do:private long collect(byte[] b, long l) {
   for (int i= 0; i < b.length; i++) {
      l<<= 8;
      l|= b&0xffL;
return l;
Your getAddresses() might look like this then:long getAddresses(); {
   long l= collect(getSource(), 0);
   return collect(getDest(), l);
}kind regards,
Jos