To access the bytes of floating point number

[avais]

I am transmitting a numer over a uart and reading the number in Matlab by using fread function. To transmit a number that occupies more than byte. I use and operation to access the individual bytes of floating point number and transmits these bytes separately
For example, x & 0xff;
gives least significand bytes of variable x
Thhen fread combines individual bytes into a number.
This method works well with fix point number but i cannot use it for floating point number. Reason is that i cannot access the individual bytes of number by using and operation.
Please guide me that how can i get access to individual bytes of floating point number.

Regards,
Avais

[JosAH]

@avais
Have a char* point to your floating point number and read all the individual chars from it, like so:

float f; // your floating point number
char* p= (char*)&f; // point to it
for (int i= 0; i < sizeof(float); i++)
   process(p[i]); // do something with that char
 

kind regards,

Jos

[donbock]

Breaking a floating point number into a sequence of bytes, sending those bytes elsewhere, and then reassembling the bytes into the same floating point number can only be accomplished if the recipient is aware of how the sender encodes floating point numbers.

The only general solution I know of that allows quite different computers to exchange floating point values is to fully define the encoding of the communications media and then provide functions at each end that translate between native encoding and that of the media.

A very convenient media encoding is ASCII, where printf and scanf are the translation functions.