read little endian 16 bit unsigned integer

I'm looking into parsing terminfo database files, which are a type of binary files. You can read about its storage format by your own and confirm the problem I'm facing.

The manual says -

The header section begins the file. This section contains six short integers in the format described below. These integers are

(1) the magic number (octal 0432);

...

...

Short integers are stored in two 8-bit bytes. The first byte contains the least significant 8 bits of the value, and the second byte contains the most significant 8 bits. (Thus, the value represented is 256*second+first.) The value -1 is represented by the two bytes 0377, 0377; other negative values are illegal. This value generally means that the corresponding capability is missing from this terminal. Machines where this does not correspond to the hardware must read the integers as two bytes and compute the little-endian value.

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• The first problem while parsing this type of input is that it fixes the size to 8 bits, so the plain old char cannot be used since it doesn't guarantees the size to be exactly 8 bits. So I was lookin 'Fixed width integer types' but again was faced with dillema of choosing b/w int8_t or uint8_t which clearly states - "provided only if the implementation directly supports the type". So what should I choose so that the type is portable enough.

• The second problem is there is no buffer.readInt16LE() method in c++ standard library which might read 16 bytes of data in Little Endian format. So how should I proceed forward to implement this function again in a portable & safe way.

I've already tried reading it with char data type but it definitely produces garbage on my machine. Proper input can be read by infocmp command eg - $ infocmp xterm.