How to get the sign, mantissa and exponent of a floating point number

My advice is to stick to rule 0 and not redo what standard libraries already do, if this is enough. Look at math.h (cmath in standard C++) and functions frexp, frexpf, frexpl, that break a floating point value (double, float, or long double) in its significand and exponent part. To extract the sign from the significand you can use signbit, also in math.h / cmath, or copysign (only C++11). Some alternatives, with slighter different semantics, are modf and ilogb/scalbn, available in C++11; http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/math/logb compares them, but I didn't find in the documentation how all these functions behave with +/-inf and NaNs. Finally, if you really want to use bitmasks (e.g., you desperately need to know the exact bits, and your program may have different NaNs with different representations, and you don't trust the above functions), at least make everything platform-independent by using the macros in float.h/cfloat.

I think it is better to use unions to do the casts, it is clearer.

#include <stdio.h>

typedef union {
  float f;
  struct {
    unsigned int mantisa : 23;
    unsigned int exponent : 8;
    unsigned int sign : 1;
  } parts;
} float_cast;

int main(void) {
  float_cast d1 = { .f = 0.15625 };
  printf("sign = %x\n", d1.parts.sign);
  printf("exponent = %x\n", d1.parts.exponent);
  printf("mantisa = %x\n", d1.parts.mantisa);
}

Example based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_precision