Reading a 32 bit floating point binary data file (little endian)

Question

I want to read a binary data file that contains 32 bit floating point binary data in python. I tried using hexdump on the file and then reading the hexdump in python. Some of the values when converted back to float returned nan. I checked if I made a mistake in combining the hexdump values but couldn't find any. This is what I did this in shell:

hexdump -vc >> output.txt

The output was of the form c0 05 e5 3f ... and so on

I joined the hex as : '3fe505c0'

Is this the correct way to do this ?

Answer 1

No.

>>> import struct
>>> struct.unpack('<f', '\xc0\x05\xe5\x3f')
(1.7892379760742188,)