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How to convert a byte array into double in C?
3 answers
I am facing some problem with converting 8 bytes to a double. I have following byte array
0x98 0xf9 0x38 0x4e 0x3a 0x9f 0x1c 0x43
And I am trying to do following
for (int i = 1; i < 8; i++)
mult[i] = 256 * mult[i - 1];
double out= buf[7] * mult[7] + buf[6] * mult[6] + buf[5] * mult[5] + buf[4] * mult[4] + buf[3] * mult[3] + buf[2] * mult[2] + buf[1] * mult[1] + buf[0] * mult[0];
But it is not giving the correct answer. I am getting out is equal to 4835915172658346392 and actual value is 2014093029293670.
Note: *((double *) (buf))
works fine but I don't think it would be compiler and OS safe.
Edit:
long mult[8];
I start with mult[0]=1
You say that 0x98 0xf9 0x38 0x4e 0x3a 0x9f 0x1c 0x43
is supposed to represent 2014093029293670
.
This is true if the former is the little-endian representation of that integer in IEEE754 binary64 format. So your approach by using byte-by-byte multiplication (or equivalently, bit shifts) is not going to work, because those are arithmetic operations.
Instead you need to alias that representation as a double
. To do this portably, on a little-endian machine on which double
is IEEE754 binary64:
static_assert( sizeof(double) == 8 );
double out;
memcpy(&out, buf, sizeof out);
If you want this code to work on a machine with different endianness then you will need to rearrange buf
before doing the memcpy
. (This is assuming that the representation is always obtained in little-endian format, which you didn't state).
Note that your code could be written more elegantly:
double out = 0;
for (int i = 1; i < 8; i++) {
mult[i] = 256 * mult[i - 1];
out += buf[i - 1] * mult[i - 1];
}
In this way you can see more clearly where is error!
Try this:
double a;
memcpy(&a, ptr, sizeof(double));
where ptr is the pointer to your byte array. If you want to avoid copying use a union, e.g.
union {
double d;
char bytes[sizeof(double)];
} u;
// Store your data in u.bytes
// Use floating point number from u.d
or
int main()
{
unsigned char id[] = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8};
long long res = 0;
for (int b = 0; b < 8; ++b)
res |= ((long long)id[b]) << (b * 8);
unsigned char *ares = (unsigned char*)&res;
for (int i = 0; i < 8; ++i)
printf("%02x ", ares[i]);
return 0;
}
or
In C++:
double x;
char buf[sizeof(double)]; // your data
#include <algorithm>
// ...
std::copy(buf, buf + sizeof(double), reinterpret_cast<char*>(&x));
In C:
#include <string.h>
/* ... */
memcpy(&x, buf, sizeof(double));
In C++11, you can also use std::begin(buf) and std::end(buf) as the boundaries (include the header ), and in both languages you can use sizeof(buf) / sizeof(buf[0]) (or simply sizeof(buf)) for the size, all provided buf is actually an array and not just a pointer.