[c++] std::string to float or double

This answer is backing up litb in your comments. I have profound suspicions you are just not displaying the result properly.

I had the exact same thing happen to me once. I spent a whole day trying to figure out why I was getting a bad value into a 64-bit int, only to discover that printf was ignoring the second byte. You can't just pass a 64-bit value into printf like its an int.