Convert “float” to bytes in Javascript without Float32Array

Question

Okay so I\'m an a fairly annoying situation where I don\'t have access to typed arrays such as Float32Array, but still need to be able to convert a Javascript number into by

Answer 1

Okay, so I actually figured it out, so I'll share my solution for single and double precision. Now I can't guarantee that they're 100% standards compliant, but they require no loops and seem to work just fine:

Single precision (given a decimal value outputs a single 32-bit big endian integer with the binary representation):

function toFloat32(value) {
    var bytes = 0;
    switch (value) {
        case Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY: bytes = 0x7F800000; break;
        case Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY: bytes = 0xFF800000; break;
        case +0.0: bytes = 0x40000000; break;
        case -0.0: bytes = 0xC0000000; break;
        default:
            if (Number.isNaN(value)) { bytes = 0x7FC00000; break; }

            if (value <= -0.0) {
                bytes = 0x80000000;
                value = -value;
            }

            var exponent = Math.floor(Math.log(value) / Math.log(2));
            var significand = ((value / Math.pow(2, exponent)) * 0x00800000) | 0;

            exponent += 127;
            if (exponent >= 0xFF) {
                exponent = 0xFF;
                significand = 0;
            } else if (exponent < 0) exponent = 0;

            bytes = bytes | (exponent << 23);
            bytes = bytes | (significand & ~(-1 << 23));
        break;
    }
    return bytes;
};

Double precision (given a decimal value outputs two 32-bit integers with the binary representation in big-endian order):

function toFloat64(value) {
    if ((byteOffset + 8) > this.byteLength) 
        throw "Invalid byteOffset: Cannot write beyond view boundaries.";

    var hiWord = 0, loWord = 0;
    switch (value) {
        case Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY: hiWord = 0x7FF00000; break;
        case Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY: hiWord = 0xFFF00000; break;
        case +0.0: hiWord = 0x40000000; break;
        case -0.0: hiWord = 0xC0000000; break;
        default:
            if (Number.isNaN(value)) { hiWord = 0x7FF80000; break; }

            if (value <= -0.0) {
                hiWord = 0x80000000;
                value = -value;
            }

            var exponent = Math.floor(Math.log(value) / Math.log(2));
            var significand = Math.floor((value / Math.pow(2, exponent)) * Math.pow(2, 52));

            loWord = significand & 0xFFFFFFFF;
            significand /= Math.pow(2, 32);

            exponent += 1023;
            if (exponent >= 0x7FF) {
                exponent = 0x7FF;
                significand = 0;
            } else if (exponent < 0) exponent = 0;

            hiWord = hiWord | (exponent << 20);
            hiWord = hiWord | (significand & ~(-1 << 20));
        break;
    }

    return [hiWord, loWord];
};

Apologies for any mistakes in copy/pasting, also the code ommits any handling of endianness, though it's fairly easy to add.

Thanks to everyone posting suggestions, but I ended up figuring out mostly on my own, as I wanted to avoid looping as much as possible for speed; it's still not exactly blazingly fast but it'll do =)

Answer 2

See BinaryParser.encodeFloat here.

Answer 3

You can use a JavaScript implementation of IEEE 754 like the one at http://ysangkok.github.io/IEEE-754/index.xhtml . It uses Emscripten and gmp.js.