["python","binary","floating-point"]
Binary representation of float in Python (bits not hex)

How can I get a string of 0s and 1s, according to the bits of the IEEE 754 representation of a 32 bit float? For example, given an input 1.00, the result should be '00111111100000000000000000000000'.
You can do that with the struct package: import struct def binary(num): return ''.join('{:0>8b}'.format(c) for c in struct.pack('!f', num)) That packs it as a network byte-ordered float, and then converts each of the resulting bytes into an 8-bit binary representation and concatenates them out: >>> binary(1) '00111111100000000000000000000000' Edit: There was a request to expand the explanation. I'll expand this using intermediate variables to comment each step. def binary(num): # Struct can provide us with the float packed into bytes. The '!' ensures that # it's in network byte order (big-endian) and the 'f' says that it should be # packed as a float. Alternatively, for double-precision, you could use 'd'. packed = struct.pack('!f', num) print 'Packed: %s' % repr(packed) # For each character in the returned string, we'll turn it into its corresponding # integer code point # # [62, 163, 215, 10] = [ord(c) for c in '>\xa3\xd7\n'] integers = [ord(c) for c in packed] print 'Integers: %s' % integers # For each integer, we'll convert it to its binary representation. binaries = [bin(i) for i in integers] print 'Binaries: %s' % binaries # Now strip off the '0b' from each of these stripped_binaries = [s.replace('0b', '') for s in binaries] print 'Stripped: %s' % stripped_binaries # Pad each byte's binary representation's with 0's to make sure it has all 8 bits: # # ['00111110', '10100011', '11010111', '00001010'] padded = [s.rjust(8, '0') for s in stripped_binaries] print 'Padded: %s' % padded # At this point, we have each of the bytes for the network byte ordered float # in an array as binary strings. Now we just concatenate them to get the total # representation of the float: return ''.join(padded) And the result for a few examples: >>> binary(1) Packed: '?\x80\x00\x00' Integers: [63, 128, 0, 0] Binaries: ['0b111111', '0b10000000', '0b0', '0b0'] Stripped: ['111111', '10000000', '0', '0'] Padded: ['00111111', '10000000', '00000000', '00000000'] '00111111100000000000000000000000' >>> binary(0.32) Packed: '>\xa3\xd7\n' Integers: [62, 163, 215, 10] Binaries: ['0b111110', '0b10100011', '0b11010111', '0b1010'] Stripped: ['111110', '10100011', '11010111', '1010'] Padded: ['00111110', '10100011', '11010111', '00001010'] '00111110101000111101011100001010'