Question

I am looking for the Python equivalent of Java’s Float.floatToBits.

I found this Python: obtain & manipulate (as integers) bit patterns of floats but does anyone know of a less complicated way?

Answer 1

The answer that Alex Martelli gives in that question is really pretty simple — you can reduce it to:

>>> import struct
>>> 
>>> 
>>> def floatToBits(f):
...     s = struct.pack('>f', f)
...     return struct.unpack('>l', s)[0]
...     
... 
>>> floatToBits(173.3125)
1127043072
>>> hex(_)
'0x432d5000'

Once you have it as an integer, you can perform any other manipulations you need to.

You can reverse the order of operations to round-trip:

>>> def bitsToFloat(b):
...     s = struct.pack('>l', b)
...     return struct.unpack('>f', s)[0]

>>> bitsToFloat(0x432d5000)
173.3125