How Do I Convert a Hex String to an IEEE-754 Single-Precision Floating-Point Number in Go?

Converting Hex Strings to IEEE-754 Float Values

Converting hex strings to floating-point values can be challenging, especially using the standard library functions alone. This article provides a solution based on the IEEE-754 conversion standard.

To start, it's crucial to determine the bit length of the input. In this case, as the hex string is four bytes long, it is likely representing a float32 number.

1. Parsing Bytes from Hex Representation

Firstly, we parse the bytes from the hex representation into an unsigned 32-bit integer (uint32) using the strconv.ParseUint() function. This function returns a uint64, so we need to convert it to uint32 to match the size of float32:

s := "C40C5253"
n, err := strconv.ParseUint(s, 16, 32)
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}
n2 := uint32(n)

2. Interpreting Bytes as an IEEE-754 Float

While we have the bytes from the hex string, they are still interpreted as an integer. To interpret them correctly as an IEEE-754 float, we use the unsafe package to create a pointer to the uint32 variable and dereference it as a float32:

f := *(*float32)(unsafe.Pointer(&n2))

3. Printing the Result

Finally, we can print the resulting float32 value:

fmt.Println(f)

Example Output:

-561.2863

4. Alternative Method

The math package provides the math.Float32frombits() function, which performs the conversion directly from a uint32 to a float32:

f := math.Float32frombits(n)

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