That's not my code - it's an example ;)

My code reads binary data from a hardware system that is encoding 32 bit
floats.  The numbers I get back from struct.decode have garbage appended
on the end of the floating point numbers beyond the 32 bit range.

There is no 32 bit float type in python that I can allocate.  If you
want a 32 bit type as an input, try this:

>>> v=123456789
>>> struct.unpack(fmt,struct.pack(fmt,v))
(123456792.0,)