[R] Single Precision (4 byte) floats with readBin

[Sundar Dorai-Raj]

Peter Lauren said the following on 9/27/2006 3:11 PM:
> I would like to use readBin to read a binary data
> file.  Most of the data is 4-byte floating point but,
> for some reason, only double precision appears to be
> offered.  I tried 
> fVariable=readBin(iFile,what=single());
> and got 35.87879 which looks believable except that
> the correct value is 3.030303.  I then tried
> fVariable=readBin(iFile,what=single(),4);
> and got 
> [1]  3.831111e+10  6.657199e+10 -5.592394e+29
> -5.592397e+29
> 
> For the second call, there were two more single
> precision floats of value 3.030303 followed by two
> more with values 40.46 and 0.00 respectively.
> 
> Is there any way around this problem other than to
> make the input data double (which I definitely do not
> want to do)? 
> 
> Many thanks in advance,
> Peter.
> 
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Hi, Peter,

I believe you can use

readBin(file, double(), size = 4)

Thanks,

--sundar