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

Question

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 th

Answer 1

This version has excess of only one byte per one floating point value to indicate the endianness. But I think, it is still not very portable however.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

#define LITEND      'L'
#define BIGEND      'B'

typedef short               INT16;
typedef int                 INT32;
typedef double              vec1_t;

 typedef struct {
    FILE            *fp;
} WFILE, RFILE;

#define w_byte(c, p)    putc((c), (p)->fp)
#define r_byte(p)       getc((p)->fp)

static void w_vec1(vec1_t v1_Val, WFILE *p)
{
    INT32   i;
    char    *pc_Val;

    pc_Val = (char *)&v1_Val;

    w_byte(LITEND, p);
    for (i = 0; ifp = fopen("test.bin", "w");
    v1_Val = 1234567890.0987654321;
    printf("v1_Val before write = %.20f \n", v1_Val);
    w_vec1(v1_Val, px_FileW);
    fclose(px_FileW->fp);

    px_FileR->fp = fopen("test.bin", "r");
    v1_Val = r_vec1(px_FileR);
    printf("v1_Val after read = %.20f \n", v1_Val);
    fclose(px_FileR->fp);
    return 0;
}