One 32bit Long into 4 8bit Chars

In C code

I'm gonna ask a stupid question here, but I'm not sure I trust my code so I want to hear if you can tell me what's wrong with my approach

Right now, the code goes

long data

char data0
char data1
char data2
char data3

data0 = data;
data1 = data >> 8;
data2 = data >> 16;
data3 = data >> 24;

but I'm not sure that's the best approach, or even a good approach. It works, which is most important obviously, but I have this nagging feeling that there's something very not Best Practices about this approach and I can't shake that feeling.

>>45
You seem like the kind of programmers that fucking template everything because hey, it has to be generic and reusable!
And you seem like the kind of programmer who would copy-paste his code and manually inline his functions because VROOM VROOM.
I'd think that the compiler is intelligent enough to unroll that loop, but even if it's not, it's not like the miniscule performance cost matters (unless you're doing embedded programming or whatever).

I'm betting only one of the posts offering a solution was made by a poster who actually has experience dealing with endianness.
I'm fairly sure that most /prog/riders used sockets, at least.