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Bit Tricks

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Bit manipulation, in some cases, can obviate or reduce the need to loop over a data structure and can give dramatic speed ups, as bits are processed in parallel.

Classic use of bit manipulation is imitation of set operations on small sets (for 64 bit computer max number of members for the set is 64, but several words can be used so it still retains speed advantages up to, say, 1024 set members (sixteen words).

The following examples are written in C, but can be applied to any language supporting bitwise operators.

Set a bit (where n is the bit number, and 0 is the least significant bit):

unsigned char a |= (1 << n);

Clear a bit:

unsigned char b &= ~(1 << n);

Toggle a bit:

 unsigned char c ^= (1 << n);

Test a bit:

 unsigned char e = d & (1 << n); //d has the byte value.

When manipulating a bitmap consisting of multiple bytes n = (index % CHAR_BIT) can be used to calculate the right bit, and the correct byte with index / CHAR_BIT.

For comprehensive collection of bit tricks see Bit Twiddling Hacks:

The fundamental source of useful bit tricks is the book: 

There is also useful information in Knuth volume 4:


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The C Programming Tips and Tricks Wiki - Bit Manipulation

These macros will be useful if you need to store a lot of yes/no info, in what is known as a bitfield. A bitfield is nothing more than a regual int, except that you manipulate each individual bit, storing either a 1 or a 0 in each.

unsigned int flags;

// Set a bit

flags = flags | 1<<bitindex;

// Clear a bit

flags = flags & ~(1<<bitindex);

// Flip a bit

flags = flags ^ 1<<bitindex;

// Test a bit

if (flags & 1<<bitindex)

printf("Bit %d is set!\n", bitindex);

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