Bitwise Operators

There are four bitwise operators (besides the shift operators):

symbol	meaning
~	NOT (or 1's compliment)
&	AND
\|	OR
^	XOR

These operators can only be applied to integer expressions. The result is on a bit by bit basis. Thus if an "int" has a size of 2 bytes or 16 bits, then the result is for the operation to be applied to each corresponding pair of bits. The result for bit 0 is the operation applied to bit 0 of both operands, while the result for bit 3 is the operation applied to bit 3 of each of the operands - all independently.

The results of the four operations is as shown in 4 small truth tables (as they are called) for all possible inputs of single bits:

NOT
x	~x
0	1
1	1

AND
x	y	x&y
0	0	0
0	1	0
1	0	0
1	1	1

OR
x	y	x\|y
0	0	0
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	1

XOR
x	y	x^y
0	0	0
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	0

As a full example, if two integer variables 'a' and 'b' have the values 100 and 69 respectively and we perform an AND, then the result is:

expression	decimal	binary
a	100	0000 0000 0110 0100
b	69	0000 0000 0100 0101
a&b	69	0000 0000 0100 0100

The spaces in the binary representation are just for clarity.