tormenta | Measurement control and analysis for super-resolution

I'm working on Tormenta (https://github.com/jpincas/tormenta) which is backed by BadgerDB (https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger). BadgerDB stores keys (slices of bytes) in byte order. I am creating keys which contain floats which need to be stored in order so I can user Badger's key iteration properly. I don't have a solid CS background so I'm a little out of my depth.

I encode the floats like this: binary.Write(buf, binary.BigEndian, myFloat). This works fine for positive floats - the key order is what you'd expect, but the byte ordering breaks down for negative floats.

As an aside, ints present the same problem, but I was able to fix that relatively easily by flipping the sign bit on the int with b[0] ^= 1 << 7 (where b is the []byte holding the result of encoding the int), and then flipping back when retrieving the key.

Although b[0] ^= 1 << 7 DOES also flip the sign bit on floats and thus places all the negative floats before the positive ones, the negative ones are incorrectly (backwards) ordered. It is necessary to flip the sign bit and reverse the order of the negative floats.

A similar question was asked on StackOverflow here: Sorting floating-point values using their byte-representation, and the solution was agreed to be:

XOR all positive numbers with 0x8000... and negative numbers with 0xffff.... This should flip the sign bit on both (so negative numbers go first), and then reverse the ordering on negative numbers.

However, that's way above my bit-flipping-skills level, so I was hoping a Go bit-ninja could help me translate that into some Go code.

I'm performing an http call to get an RSS feed from a newspaper xml feed from latin america and then transform the response body to JSON. The problem with latin american papers are newspapers is common to find latin characters that need to be encoded, such á é í ó ú.

The problem is that the response is not encoded properly so I get description like this one: Las lluvias llegar��an a la ciudad de C��rdoba jueves y viernes seg��n prev�� el Servicio Meteorol��gico Nacional (SMN)

I've tried setting encoding parameters for the http component and the xmljson marshal and neither of both work. I also tried forcing Content-Type headers for application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8 and application/json; charset=utf-8 but neither.

I'm using the following DataFormat: