How to reconstruct floats stored in PoolByteArray?

Question

I'm sending UDP packets to a PC that runs a Godot app. The packets contain 4 byte floats. I'm using PacketPeerUDP to receive the packets. The problem is that, PacketPeerUDP has only a method (getpacket()) to read packets as bytes and not as floats.... How to reconstruct the the packets as floats? (I don't want to use getvar() because it introduces extra overhead to the sender)
Any ideas are highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Maybe you can use a StreamPeerBuffer? https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_streampeerbuffer.html#class-streampeerbuffer

Comments

The actual implementation could be something like this:

var spb = StreamPeerBuffer.new()
spb.data_array = pkt
var single_float = spb.get_float()

Answer 2

I had to resort to brute-forcing the solution, according to the IEEE754 specifications.

func bin2float(pkt:PoolByteArray) -> float:
#Convert packet to an array of bools
var arr:Array=[]
for byte in pkt:
    for _i in range(0,8):
        arr.append(byte%2)
        byte/=2

#Extract sign
var r_sign:int
if arr[31]==1:
    r_sign=-1
else:
    r_sign=1

#Extract exponent
var r_exp:int=0
for i in range(30,22,-1):
    r_exp*=2
    r_exp+=arr[i]
r_exp-=127

#Extract mantissa
var r_mant:float=0
for i in range(0,23):
    r_mant+=arr[i]
    r_mant/=2
r_mant+=1

return r_sign*pow(2,r_exp)*r_mant

Of course this is terribly slow, and a real native solution would still be greatly appreciated, but this works in the meantime.