Tutorial :Convert byte array to float in Lua [Float Data Structure]

Question:

I have the ability to read the memory with Lua, but I've run into a problem. I want to read a float value.

I have, what I presume to be a float, in the memory which looks like this.

Byte Array 65 B6 40 43 EC 35 87 41 51 04 9E 3F  Float Value 192.712478637695

I know the float value because I'm using a memory editor. In Lua I have a function similar to memcpy, it's called readmem(Address,bytes) it returns an integer value.

How would I read the byte array into a float in Lua using readmem.

For the sake of this question I suppose you could assume that the 6 in 65 is address 00000000.

Solution:1

Weird, this seems to be stored in middle-endian order. (I checked this with http://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatApplet/IEEE754.html)

Anyway, you can do the conversion in pure Lua using code from http://yueliang.luaforge.net/

If you can use C, try one of the libraries listed in http://lua-users.org/wiki/StructurePacking

Solution:2

This is a fair amount of work to get everything right. You'll need to extract the exponent and significand (the significand is sometimes called the mantissa), convert to float using math.frexp, and then negate the result if the sign bit is set. You'll also have to recognize denormalized numbers and NaNs. (In a normalized number, the most significant bit of the significand is implicit; in a denormalized number it's explicit.) If you simply must do this yourself, you'll find it helpful to read Dave Goldberg's article on everything a computer scientist needs to know about floating point. Also keep in mind that a Lua number is an IEEE double, and be careful about precision.

If I were doing this myself, there's no way I'd go through all this painâ€"instead I'd write C code to read the bytes and call lua_pushnumber.

Solution:3

You must write a C function to accomplish the conversion. Lua does not have casts or anything like them.

Solution:4

string.pack

Passing 'f' as the first parameter will return a 4 byte string of the single precision representation, while 'd' will return an 8 byte string of the double precision representation. You can even declare the endianness of the float

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