Question

I’m trying to convert very long binary strings, often greater than 52 bits into numbers. I cannot have a fixed lookahead window because I am doing this to calculate a version of Lempel-Ziv complexity for neural data.

When I try to convert any long string, bin2dec throws and error that the binary string must be 52 bits or less.

Is there a way to get around this size limitation?

Answer 1

dec2bin throws that error because a single is not capable of storing that much precision. Your very question asks an impossibility. You have two choices: store the value in something other than a floating point value, or throw away some precision before you convert.

Or describe more completely what you’re trying to accomplish.

EDITING:

Based on your additional information, I am even more certain that converting to floating point is not what you want to do. If you want to reduce the storage size to something more efficient, convert to a vector of bytes (uint8), which is as dense as you can get. Just split the binary string into N rows of 8 digits each, using reshape. This seems to be an accepted approach for biological data.

str = char((rand(1, 100)>0.5) + '0');    % test data
data = uint8(bin2dec(reshape(str(1:end-mod(end,8)), [], 8)));

In this code, I toss any bits that don’t divide evenly into 8. Or, skip the uint8 step and just perform your processing on the resulting vector, where each double-precision float represents one 8-bit word from your sequence.