Convert float to bigint (aka portable way to get binary exponent & mantissa)

Question

In C++, I have a bigint class that can hold an integer of arbitrary size.

I'd like to convert large float or double numbers to bigint. I have a working method, but it's a bit of a hack. I used IEEE 754 number specification to get the binary sign, mantissa and exponent of the input number.

Here is the code (Sign is ignored here, that's not important):

 float input = 77e12;
 bigint result;

 // extract sign, exponent and mantissa, 
 // according to IEEE 754 single precision number format
 unsigned int *raw = reinterpret_cast<unsigned int *>(&input); 
 unsigned int sign = *raw >> 31;
 unsigned int exponent = (*raw >> 23) & 0xFF;
 unsigned int mantissa = *raw & 0x7FFFFF;

 // the 24th bit is always 1.
 result = mantissa + 0x800000;

 // use the binary exponent to shift the result left or right
 int shift = (23 - exponent + 127);
 if (shift > 0) result >>= shift; else result <<= -shift;

 cout << input << " " << result << endl;

It works, but it's rather ugly, and I don't know how portable it is. Is there a better way to do this? Is there a less ugly, portable way to extract the binary mantissa and exponent from a float or double?

---

Thanks for the answers. For posterity, here is a solution using frexp. It's less efficient because of the loop, but it works for float and double alike, doesn't use reinterpret_cast or depend on any knowledge of floating point number representations.

float input = 77e12;
bigint result;

int exponent;
double fraction = frexp (input, &exponent);
result = 0;
exponent--;
for (; exponent > 0; --exponent)
{
    fraction *= 2;
    if (fraction >= 1)
    {
        result += 1;
        fraction -= 1;
    }
    result <<= 1;
}   

Answer 1

Can't you normally extract the values using frexp(), frexpf(), frexpl()?