Byte[] to float?

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to write an applet which talks to its parent server. The server sends a series of floats (4 bytes each) to the applet, which is stored to a byte array by BufferedInputStream.read(buffer, 0, 4). I need to convert those 4-byte-sized byte array to a float like this:
float Number = (float)ByteArray; // Doesn't work!
Is there any helper functions in java to do this? Or should I send the numbers as plain text through the network, and then convert from String to float instead? (Obviously I don't wanna do that due to great performance hit)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Aaron

Answer 1

It is possible to convert a byte array to a float:
* Converts an array of bytes to a float.
* @param arr  an array of 4 bytes to be converted
* @return a float value comprising the bytes in
static float byteArrayToFloat(final byte[] arr) {
   int bits = (arr[0] << 24) | (arr[1] << 16) |
                (arr[2] << 8) | arr[3];
   return Float.intBitsToFloat(bits);
}But why not just use a DataInputStream?