What happens when float pointer is typecasted to char pointer?

Question

int main()
{
    float f = 12.2;
    char *p1;
    p1 = (char *)&f;
    printf (\"%d\", *p1);
}

This outputs 51.

Answer 1

Mostly what EFraim says, except that you did cast to char*, only the stackoverflow markup was wrong.

So you get the least significant byte of f's internal representation (in IEEE-754).