Bitwise operators

Bitwise operators are used to perform operations based around the bits that make up a numeric value. Each operator returns the numeric result of a bitwise operation.The available operators are:

• Binary and: -band
• Binary or: -bor
• Binary exclusive or: -bxor
• Binary not: -bnot
• Shift left: -shl
• Shift right: -shr

All numeric values can be broken down into bytes and, in turn, bits, a base 2 value.A byte is made up of 8 bits. Each bit in the byte has a value based on its position, highest value (or most significant) first. These bits can be combined to make up any number between 0 and 255.The possible bit values for a byte in base 10 can be represented as a table:

Bit position	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Bit value	128	64	32	16	8	4	2	1

Table: 6.1: Bit (base 2) values of a base 10 byte

This is not to say that the bitwise operators only work on byte values. The examples in this section use a single byte as the easiest to describe as a table.Bitwise operators are perhaps not all that...