How to perform a bitwise operation on floating point numbers

You can work around the strict-aliasing rule and perform bitwise operations on a float type-punned as an uint32_t (if your implementation defines it, which most do) without undefined behavior by using memcpy():

float a = 1.4123f;
uint32_t b;

std::memcpy(&b, &a, 4);
// perform bitwise operation
b &= 1u << 3;
std::memcpy(&a, &b, 4);

At the language level, there's no such thing as "bitwise operation on floating-point numbers". Bitwise operations in C/C++ work on value-representation of a number. And the value-representation of floating point numbers is not defined in C/C++ (unsigned integers are an exception in this regard, as their shift is defined as-if they are stored in 2's complement). Floating point numbers don't have bits at the level of value-representation, which is why you can't apply bitwise operations to them.

All you can do is analyze the bit content of the raw memory occupied by the floating-point number. For that you need to either use a union as suggested below or (equivalently, and only in C++) reinterpret the floating-point object as an array of unsigned char objects, as in

float f = 5;
unsigned char *c = reinterpret_cast<unsigned char *>(&f);
// inspect memory from c[0] to c[sizeof f - 1]

And please, don't try to reinterpret a float object as an int object, as other answers suggest. That doesn't make much sense, and is not guaranteed to work in compilers that follow strict-aliasing rules in optimization. The correct way to inspect memory content in C++ is by reinterpreting it as an array of [signed/unsigned] char.

Also note that you technically aren't guaranteed that floating-point representation on your system is IEEE754 (although in practice it is unless you explicitly allow it not to be, and then only with respect to -0.0, ±infinity and NaN).

If you are trying to change the bits in the floating-point representation, you could do something like this:

union fp_bit_twiddler {
    float f;
    int i;
} q;
q.f = a;
q.i &= (1 << 3);
a = q.f;

As AndreyT notes, accessing a union like this invokes undefined behavior, and the compiler could grow arms and strangle you. Do what he suggests instead.