XOR ( ^ ): Bitwise XOR also takes two equal-length bit patterns. If both bits in the compared position of the bit patterns are 0, the bit in the resulting bit pattern is 0, otherwise 1. OR ( | ): Bitwise OR is also a binary operator that operates on two equal-length bit patterns, similar to bitwise AND. If both bits in the compared position of the bit patterns are 1, the bit in the resulting bit pattern is 1, otherwise 0. Lets take an example.ĪND ( & ): Bitwise AND is a binary operator that operates on two equal-length bit patterns. Bitwise NOT is nothing but simply the one’s complement of a number. NOT ( ~ ): Bitwise NOT is an unary operator that flips the bits of the number i.e., if the ith bit is 0, it will change it to 1 and vice versa. Bit operations are fast and can be used in optimizing time complexity. These bit operations operate on the individual bits of the bit patterns. There are different bitwise operations used in the bit manipulation. = 1 * 2 4 + 0 * 2 3 + 1 * 2 2 + 0 * 2 1 + 0 * 2 0įor characters, we use ASCII representation, which are in the form of integers which again can be represented using bits as explained above. We all know that 1 byte comprises of 8 bits and any integer or character can be represented using bits in computers, which we call its binary form(contains only 1 or 0) or in its base 2 form. Bitwise Operations are faster and closer to the system and sometimes optimize the program to a good level. In order to encode, decode or compress files we have to extract the data at bit level. Operations with bits are used in Data compression (data is compressed by converting it from one representation to another, to reduce the space), Exclusive-Or Encryption (an algorithm to encrypt the data for safety issues). In some cases, a programmer needs to go beyond this - that is to say that in a deeper level where the importance of bits is realized. Working on bytes, or data types comprising of bytes like ints, floats, doubles or even data structures which stores large amount of bytes is normal for a programmer.

Flip all bits in a byte