What is this floating point format?
binary, binaryfiles, floating-point
Solution
The data described is consistent with the usual IEEE 754 format, stored in big-endian order, then displayed by a little-endian dump program two bytes at a time.
32-bit floats in the interval [8, 128) have first bytes of 0x41 or 0x42. Consider such a number, perhaps 0x41010203. Stored big end first, it would appear in memory as the four bytes 0x41, 0x01, 0x02, and 0x03. When the dump program reads 16-byte integers, little end first, it will read and display 0x0141 and 0x0302.
Problem
I am trying to figure out how to read a historical binary data file. I believe it came from an older 32 bit Solaris system. I am looking at a section of the file that I believe contains 32 bit floating numbers (not IEEE floats). The format appears to be (as a hex dump): ``` xx41 xxxx xx42 xxxx ``` The 41 and 42 in those positions appear consistently through the floating point numbers. I'm afraid that I do not have any additional information to add to this. So the first part of my question is, what format is this? If the first part can not be answered directly, a list of likely possibilities would be great. Lastly, how would you suggest going about determining what format this is? Thank you for your input.