Heuristic to identify if a series of 4 bytes chunks of data are integers or floats
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Published on 2010-03-21T00:53:53Z
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What's the best heuristic I can use to identify whether a chunk of X 4-bytes are integers or floats? A human can do this easily, but I wanted to do it programmatically.
I realize that since every combination of bits will result in a valid integer and (almost?) all of them will also result in a valid float, there is no way to know for sure. But I still would like to identify the most likely candidate (which will virtually always be correct; or at least, a human can do it).
For example, let's take a series of 4-bytes raw data and print them as integers first and then as floats:
1 1.4013e-45 10 1.4013e-44 44 6.16571e-44 5000 7.00649e-42 1024 1.43493e-42 0 0 0 0 -5 -nan 11 1.54143e-44
Obviously they will be integers.
Now, another example:
1065353216 1 1084227584 5 1085276160 5.5 1068149391 1.33333 1083179008 4.5 1120403456 100 0 0 -1110651699 -0.1 1195593728 50000
These will obviously be floats.
PS: I'm using C++ but you can answer in any language, pseudo code or just in english.
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