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

fwrite(), fread()? You will likely want binary, and you cannot pack the bytes any tighter unless you want to sacrifice precision which you would do in the program and then fwrite() fread() anyway; float a; double b; a=(float)b; fwrite(&a,1,sizeof(a),fp);

If you are carrying different floating point formats around they may not convert in a straight binary sense, so you may have to pick apart the bits and perform the math, this to the power that plus this, etc. IEEE 754 is a dreadful standard to use but widespread so it would minimize the effort.