Heuristic to identify if a series of 4 bytes chunks of data are integers or floats
- by flint
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.
