Portable data reinterpretation

Question

I want to reinterpret data of one type as another type in a portable way (C99). I am not talking about casting, I want a reinterpretation of some given dat

Answer 1

If you want to avoid the strict aliasing rule, you need to first cast to a char pointer:

float float_value = 3.14;
int *int_pointer = (int *)(char *)&float_value;
int int_value = *int_pointer;

Note however, that you might have sizeof(int) > sizeof(float), in which case you still get undefined behavior