Java: Bytes to floats / ints

Question

I have a byte array sent via UDP from x-plane. The bytes (4) are all floats or integers… I tried to cast them to floats but no luck so far…

Example array: byte d

Answer 1

You probably want to make use of java.nio.ByteBuffer. It has a lot of handy methods for pulling different types out of a byte array and should also handle most issues of endianness for you (including switching the byte order if necessary).

byte[] data = new byte[36]; 
//... populate byte array...

ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(data);

int first = buffer.getInt();
float second = buffer.getFloat();

It also has fancy features for converting your byte array to an int array (via an IntBuffer from the asIntBuffer() method) or float array (via a FloatBuffer from the asFloatBuffer() method) if you know that the input is really all of one type.