How to get the bits of a “double” as a “long”

Question

I would like to manipulate the bitwise representation of floating-point numbers in C#. BinaryWriter and BinaryReader do it this way:

public virtual unsafe void W         


        

Answer 1

Are you trying to avoid unsafe code altogether, or do you just want an alternative to those specific methods on BinaryReader and BinaryWriter?

You could use BitConverter.DoubleToInt64Bits and BitConverter.Int64BitsToDouble, which are designed to do exactly what you need, although I think they use the same unsafe conversion behind-the-scenes as the BinaryReader/BinaryWriter methods.