Bitwise Operators in C++

Sahil Ali
4 min readMay 22, 2024

Bitwise operations are a way to directly work with the binary digits (bits) of a number.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In C++, these operations use specific symbols to manipulate bits in various ways. Let’s explore these operations and some cool tricks you can do with them!

Basic Bitwise Operators

  1. AND (&): Compares each bit of two numbers and returns a new number whose bits are 1 if both bits are 1, and 0 otherwise.
    Example:
int result = 5 & 3; // result will be 1 (0000 0101 & 0000 0011 = 0000 0001)

2. OR (|): Compares each bit of two numbers and returns a new number whose bits are 1 if at least one of the bits is 1.
Example:

int result = 5 | 3; // result will be 7 (0000 0101 | 0000 0011 = 0000 0111)

3. XOR (^): Compares each bit of two numbers and returns a new number whose bits are 1 if the bits are different.
Example:

int result = 5 ^ 3; // result will be 6 (0000 0101 ^ 0000 0011 = 0000 0110)

4. NOT (~): Flips all the bits of a number (0s become 1s and 1s become 0s).
Example:

int result = ~5; // result will be -6 (1111 1010)

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Sahil Ali
Sahil Ali

Written by Sahil Ali

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