retrieve bitwise float representation

[Peter Otten]

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

> I need to pack a floating point value into a vector of 32-bit unsigned
> values in IEEE format. Further, I maintain a CRC32 checksum for integrity
> checking. For the latter, I actually need the float as integral value.
> 
> What I currently do is this:
> 
>   tmp = struct.pack("=f", f)
>   (i,) = struct.unpack("=L", tmp)
> 
> IOW, I pack and unpack the float using the struct module, which works.
> 
> 
> What I'm wondering is whether there are any better or alternative ways to
> achieve this, the overhead now seems enormous and unnecessary to me here.

binascii.crc32() operates on strings, so you don't need to unpack.
If you have many float values array.array() should be more effective than 
struct.pack().

>>> some_floats = map(float, range(5))
>>> binascii.crc32(array.array("f", some_floats))
1758053516