Read/Write bytes of float in JS

I've created an expansion of Milos' solution that should be a bit faster, assuming TypedArrays are not an option of course (in my case I'm working with an environment where they're not available):

function Bytes2Float32(bytes) {
    var sign = (bytes & 0x80000000) ? -1 : 1;
    var exponent = ((bytes >> 23) & 0xFF) - 127;
    var significand = (bytes & ~(-1 << 23));

    if (exponent == 128) 
        return sign * ((significand) ? Number.NaN : Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY);

    if (exponent == -127) {
        if (significand == 0) return sign * 0.0;
        exponent = -126;
        significand /= (1 << 22);
    } else significand = (significand | (1 << 23)) / (1 << 23);

    return sign * significand * Math.pow(2, exponent);
}

Given an integer containing 4 bytes holding an IEEE-754 32-bit single precision float, this will produce the (roughly) correct Javascript number value without using any loops.

Koolinc's snippet is good if you need a solution that powerful, but if you need it for limited use you are better off writing your own code. I wrote the following function for converting a string hex representation of bytes to a float:

function decodeFloat(data) {
    var binary = parseInt(data, 16).toString(2);
    if (binary.length < 32) 
        binary = ('00000000000000000000000000000000'+binary).substr(binary.length);
    var sign = (binary.charAt(0) == '1')?-1:1;
    var exponent = parseInt(binary.substr(1, 8), 2) - 127;
    var significandBase = binary.substr(9);
    var significandBin = '1'+significandBase;
    var i = 0;
    var val = 1;
    var significand = 0;

    if (exponent == -127) {
        if (significandBase.indexOf('1') == -1)
            return 0;
        else {
            exponent = -126;
            significandBin = '0'+significandBase;
        }
    }

    while (i < significandBin.length) {
        significand += val * parseInt(significandBin.charAt(i));
        val = val / 2;
        i++;
    }

    return sign * significand * Math.pow(2, exponent);
}

There are detailed explanations of algorithms used to convert in both directions for all formats of floating points on wikipedia, and it is easy to use those to write your own code. Converting from a number to bytes should be more difficult because you need to normalize the number first.

You can do it with typed arrays:

var buffer = new ArrayBuffer(4);
var intView = new Int32Array(buffer);
var floatView = new Float32Array(buffer);

floatView[0] = Math.PI
console.log(intView[0].toString(2)); //bits of the 32 bit float

Or another way:

var view = new DataView(new ArrayBuffer(4));
view.setFloat32(0, Math.PI);
console.log(view.getInt32(0).toString(2)); //bits of the 32 bit float

Not sure what browser support is like though