C - Serialization of the floating point numbers (floats, doubles)

How to convert a floating point number into a sequence of bytes so that it can be persisted in a file? Such algorithm must be fast and highly portable. It must allow also the opposite operation, deserialization. It would be nice if only very tiny excess of bits per value (persistent space) is required.

Solution 1:

Assuming you're using mainstream compilers, floating point values in C and C++ obey the IEEE standard and when written in binary form to a file can be recovered in any other platform, provided that you write and read using the same byte endianess. So my suggestion is: pick an endianess of choice, and before writing or after reading, check if that endianess is the same as in the current platform; if not, just swap the bytes.

Solution 2:

This might give you a good start - it packs a floating point value into an int and long long pair, which you can then serialise in the usual way.

#define FRAC_MAX 9223372036854775807LL /* 2**63 - 1 */

struct dbl_packed
{
    int exp;
    long long frac;
};

void pack(double x, struct dbl_packed *r)
{
    double xf = fabs(frexp(x, &r->exp)) - 0.5;

    if (xf < 0.0)
    {
        r->frac = 0;
        return;
    }

    r->frac = 1 + (long long)(xf * 2.0 * (FRAC_MAX - 1));

    if (x < 0.0)
        r->frac = -r->frac;
}

double unpack(const struct dbl_packed *p)
{
    double xf, x;

    if (p->frac == 0)
        return 0.0;

    xf = ((double)(llabs(p->frac) - 1) / (FRAC_MAX - 1)) / 2.0;

    x = ldexp(xf + 0.5, p->exp);

    if (p->frac < 0)
        x = -x;

    return x;
}