Bit twiddling floating point numbers

[Mensanator]

On Mar 5, 2:25 pm, "Jeff.Goldfin... at gmail.com"
<Jeff.Goldfin... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> Is there a simple way to twiddle the bits of a float? In particular, I
> would like to round my float to the n most significant bits.
>
> For example - 0.123 in binary is 0.000111111
> Rounding to 4 bits I get 0.0001.
>
> I can pack and unpack a float into a long
> e.g.
> struct.unpack('I',struct.pack('f',0.123))[0]
> but then I'm not sure how to work with the resulting long.
>
> Any suggestions?

Here's one.

>>> import gmpy

# create a  base 10 float
>>> f = gmpy.mpf('123.456')
>>> f
mpf('1.23456e2')

# format in base 2, fixed point
>>> f2 = gmpy.fdigits(f,2,0,0,99)
>>> f2
'1111011.01110100101111000110101001111110111110011101101100100010111'

# seperate the characteristic from the mantissa
>>> fs = f2.split('.')

# re-assemble with the mantissa truncated to desired # of bits
>>> f3 = fs[0]+'.'+fs[1][:4]
>>> f3
'1111011.0111'

# convert the string back to a base 10 float
>>> f4 = gmpy.mpf(f3,0,2)
>>> print f4
123.4375

# check: print as base 2 and see how many digits are past radix point
>>> print gmpy.fdigits(f4,2,0,0,99)
1111011.0111