STM32F0 uint32_t access across boundary

Hi

I am using MDK5.11a on STM32F050. I come across a hard fault, which I eventually find out it is the following construct that causes the problem.

The following is just to demonstrate the fault.

uint8_t array[30] ;
uint32_t *intptr ;
uint8_t i ;
.....
.....
for(i = 0 ; i <= 10 ; i++)
{ intptr = *(uint32_t*)&array[i]) ;

// then access via the integer pointer if(*intptr == 0) {.... }
}

sure, sooner or later, it crashes with hard fault.

My problem in using this approach to access 32 bit is that I received a stream of data from the USART, and put into the array. Depending on the header bytes, somewhere down the stream, the data bytes can either be interpreted as uint16_t or uint32_t, so accessing the 1st byte of the uint32_t by casting its address to uint32_t* and accessing it as 32 bit may bear the problem if the 4 bytes are not aligned correctly, which in my case, is very likely.

The easy way is copy byte by byte (memcpy) into a uint32_t variable and then further processing the variable. But is there any easy way (compiler directives)? As the construct is C compliant, I would have thought that it is the work of the compiler to deal with this automatically without user knowledge about this cross boundary problem?

Rgds

Calvin