How can I convert 4 bytes storing an IEEE 754 floating point number to a float value in C?

Question

My program reads into 4 bytes an IEEE 754 floating point number from a file. I need to portable convert those bytes to my C compilers float type. In other words I need a fun

Answer 1

If the endianness is the same, then like so:

float f;
memcpy(&f, raw_value, sizeof f);
return f;

If not, say:

float f;
char * p = (char *)&f;

And now populate the bytes p[0]... manually as needed.