> 0-5 : 4 bits
I wonder how you came up with 4. ;-)

@llemes4011
Coming up with your own serialization mechanism is hard; continue if you are doing this for fun but do remember that there are many other good binary serialization formats out there which can lessen your work and reduce the agony. A comparison of various serialization libraries can be found here.

Oh yes, thanks. I jumped straight to ( smallest n where 2^n >= 5 ), but it should be (2^(n+1) - 1) >= 5
Sorry OP, subtract 1 bit from my previous post.
J.

closer to around 40,000 >.< I was hoping that it would be a bit easier and more convenient than this for my needs >.<

Well, I would definitely say that for 40,000 it would be worth using byte and short (as per my previous post), but not worth trying to pack the bits any tighter.

> closer to around 40,000

40,000 is nothing, unless you have some specifications which you would need to meet and you have *confirmed* that doing things your way is much faster than the other simpler approaches.

IMO just go with the normal way of doing things i.e. writing data as comma separated values. If you are feeling adventurous, rather screw around with an embeddable database than get involved with all the bit-fiddling. Optimize when needed and that too after profiling; premature optimization is the root of all evil.

field1(int) range = 0 to 5 {3}
field2(float) range = 0.00 to 30.00 (need 2 sig-figs) {5+7=12}
field3(float) range = 0.00 to 30.00 (need 2 sig-figs) {5+7=12}
field4(int) range = 0 to 100 {3}

So 30 bits total. 32-bit integer so 2 spare bits. What fields should those two bits be given to for future expansion?

so 32/192 compaction ratio.

Hey! Now it's my turn!

> 0-100 : 3 bits
I wonder how you came up with 3. ;-)


Anyway I agree with sos. Unless you need to store this data on punched cards, the odd few 10k bytes here or there is pretty much irrelevant.

Ok, thanks for all the help you guys, this stuff is way over my head anyways =P Maybe I'll understand it some day, lol, for now im going to stick with just writing the values to the file.