half-life time-4 byte binary to float32

Anon

I'll try and make this as intelligable as possible.

I've made a php script that will connect to a half-life server and retrieve all of the status information available, but I'm stumbling in one spot. The definition of the time a player is on the server is sent as 4 bytes for a float32. Does anyone have any idea on how to convert this? I've played with unpack("f*", $var), but don't think I've hit the right combination.

Anon

Could you post a bin2hex($variable) of the value you want? And possibly also the time you know that variable represents.

Anon

Here are the hex numbers and the approx minutes. I used pingtool to get the minutes in the server status and my script to get the hex. The method I used for the hex was this...

$ret = dechex(ord(fread($fp, 1)));
$ret .= dechex(ord(fread($fp, 1)));
$ret .= dechex(ord(fread($fp, 1)));
$ret .= dechex(ord(fread($fp, 1)));

aa649d43 = 5 minutes
2b3bee44 = 31 minutes
55486444 = 15 minutes

roel_v

You are reading just 1 byte from the socket? In your first post you said the time is given as 4 bytes. Maybe this is the problem? Otherwise, can you post bin2hex(fread($fp,4)); ? I could probably reverse it from what you posted, but you have to understand, I'm here sitting in the office in from of my computer on a saterday evening at 23.05, and I don't really feel like it :-)

Anon

Yes, this probably is very ugly, but it appears to be what I'm looking for. I didn't do anything with the sign since the connection time should always be positive.

function get_float32($fp) {
// pulls a float32 from the file pointer ($fp)

$bin = '';

for($loop = 0; $loop <= 3; $loop++) {
$bin = str_pad(decbin(ord(fread($fp, 1))), 8, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT).$bin;
}

// get sign
$sign = bindec(substr($bin, 0, 1));

// get exponent and adjust for special case and bias
$exponent = bindec(substr($bin, 1, 8));
$exponent = ($exponent)? $exponent - 127 : $exponent;

if($exponent) {
// get the binary number of the mantissa
$int = bindec('1'.substr($bin, 9, $exponent));
$dec = bindec(substr($bin, 9 + $exponent));

$time = "$int.$dec";

return number_format($time / 60, 2);

} else {
return 0.0;
}
}