RGBA to Float

[SpiderPig]

I have packed integers and floats into a texture to use in my shader.  Information is packed into the texture by poking a buffer and then assigning that buffer to an RGBA texture.  The following code extracts an integer from a texelFetch result in the fragment shader.  It seems to work well.

int BytesToInteger( in vec4 pixel ) {
	return ( int( ( pixel.w * 255.0f ) ) << 24 ) | ( int( ( pixel.z * 255.0f ) ) << 16 ) | ( int( ( pixel.y * 255.0f ) ) << 8 ) | int( ( pixel.x * 255.0f ) );
}

However the same process does not work for floats and I'm sure there is a reason why but I can't figure it out.  Any one know the answer? 

float BytesToFloat( in vec4 pixel ) {
	return float( ( int( ( pixel.w * 255.0f ) ) << 24 ) | ( int( ( pixel.z * 255.0f ) ) << 16 ) | ( int( ( pixel.y * 255.0f ) ) << 8 ) | int( ( pixel.x * 255.0f ) ) );
}

 

[SpiderPig]

intBitsToFloat()

Funny how simply making a post can make the answer show up on your next google search.