How Can I Read the Binary Representation of a Floating Point Number in LabVIEW?

Issue Details

I'm trying to read the binary representation of a floating point number in LabVIEW. I tried using the Type Cast function to read the floating point number as a Boolean array but I only get 8 bits for a 64 bit double precision number. I would expect to get an array of Boolean that had 64 elements. What am I missing?

Solution

 In order to get the actual binary representation, you will first need to typecast the floating point number into an array of integers. You can then feed this array into an auto-indexed for loop. In each iteration of the loop, an integer is converted to a Boolean array with the "Number to Boolean Array" function found in the Boolean palette. For an illustration, see the picture below. 


Note: This image is a LabVIEW snippet, which includes LabVIEW code that you can reuse in your project. To use a snippet, right-click the image, save it to your computer, and drag the file onto your LabVIEW diagram.

Additional Information

When you typecast your floating point number into an array of Booleans, you will only get a Boolean element for each byte in your number. For example, if you have a double precision number (8 bytes), you will get a Boolean array with a size of 8 elements. Although a Boolean element could theoretically only take one bit of memory, they each actually consume a whole byte.

LabVIEW floating point numbers are stored in IEEE 754 format. The following table shows the layout for single (32-bit) and double (64-bit) precision floating-point values. The number of bits for each field are shown (bit ranges are in square brackets): 
 

	Sign	Exponent	Fraction	Bias
Single Precision	1 [31]	8 [30-23]	23 [22-00]	127
Double Precision	1 [63]	11 [62-52]	52 [51-00]	1023

Note: When running the example code from the image below, the bytes will be swapped on an Intel based computer because of the Little Endian format. So the order of the bytes will be as follows (by row of the array, starting at index 0): 7, 8, 5, 6, 3, 4, 1, 2.