Read in 4-byte words from binary file in Julia

I'm not sure of the best way of reading it in as Float32 directly, but given an array of 4*n Uint8s, I'd turn it into an array of n Float32s using reinterpret (doc link):

raw = rand(Uint8, 4*10)  # i.e. a vector of Uint8 aka bytes
floats = reinterpret(Float32, raw)  # now a vector of 10 Float32s

With output:

julia> raw = rand(Uint8, 4*2)
8-element Array{Uint8,1}:
 0xc8
 0xa3
 0xac
 0x12
 0xcd
 0xa2
 0xd3
 0x51

julia> floats = reinterpret(Float32, raw)
2-element Array{Float32,1}:
 1.08951e-27
 1.13621e11

(EDIT 2020: Outdated, see newest answer.) I found the issue. The correct way of importing binary data in single precision floating point format is read(f, Float32, NUM_VALS), where f is the file stream, Float32 is the data type, and NUM_VALS is the number of words (values or data points) in the binary data file.

It turns out that every time you call read(f, [...]) the data pointer iterates to the next item in the binary file.

This allows people to be able to read in data line-by-line simply:

f = open("my_file.bin")
first_item = read(f, Float32)
second_item = read(f, Float32)
# etc ...

However, I wanted to load in all the data in one line of code. As I was debugging, I had used read() on the same file pointer several times without re-declaring the file pointer. As a result, when I experimented with the correct operation, namely read(f, Float32, NUM_VALS), I got an unexpected value.