I have a working version of a homemade DNS server/relay written in C and compiled in linux for my router. The process involves encoding/decoding/ammending DNS messages which are accessed via a pointer of type:

void *data

My original version moved this pointer along to access the different data points, however as the code became more complicated, I decided to instead access the data directly without ever moving the pointer to avoid any errors should I forget to return the pointer to its original position. The pointer is thus left to always point to the beginning of the data.

My current version accesses data as follows:

ntohs( *(uint16_t*)&(((char*)data)[pos]) )

to decode the 16bit unsigned integer starting at position pos as an example.

Can this seemingly simple task be done more efficiently/succinctly in C?