I have always had a hard time remembering rules of bit manipulation in Java.
So, when someone asked this question on Stackoverflow.com, I knew he had to do masking, but I forgot why.
I decided to look up bit wise operations on Wikipedia to refresh my memory. However, this time I am also blogging the answer so I don't forget (yet another use of blogging :-) ).
There are two types of bit shift operations: arithmetic shift, and logical shift. An arithmetic right shift preserves the sign bit, while logical shifts always insert a zero.
Representing -1 as a signed byte we get: 11111111
-1 >> 1 gives us: 11111111
-1 >>> 1 gives us: 01111111
so by this logic (-1 >>> 8) should give us 00000000 which is 0
Well not so:
The output I get is:
-1 >> 8 = 16777215
Hmmm. what just happened? Java converted the signed byte into a signed int, and then did an arithmetic right shift of 8 bits.
So Java converted -1 to a signed 32 bit integer:
Then did a logical right shift of 8 bits getting
which is: 16777215 in base 10
ok, let's try casting the output back into a byte
The output is:
-1 >> 8 = -1
That did not help because the lower 8 bits of the answer are still all 1's, so casting to a byte gives us -1.
ok, so how do I get the 0 I was after? We can get it by bit masking the byte.
Running the above code gives us an output of:
-1 >>> 8 = 0
So what just happened? b is still converted into a signed 32 bit integer, giving us:
but then we mask it with 0xFF, which gives us
Now when we do a logical right shift of 8 bits, we get
I hope this post helps me remember bit wise operations in Java, and I hope it helps you too. If you have a problem remembering things like I do, you may want to create a little example code and blog about it yourself.
So, when someone asked this question on Stackoverflow.com, I knew he had to do masking, but I forgot why.
I decided to look up bit wise operations on Wikipedia to refresh my memory. However, this time I am also blogging the answer so I don't forget (yet another use of blogging :-) ).
There are two types of bit shift operations: arithmetic shift, and logical shift. An arithmetic right shift preserves the sign bit, while logical shifts always insert a zero.
Representing -1 as a signed byte we get: 11111111
-1 >> 1 gives us: 11111111
-1 >>> 1 gives us: 01111111
so by this logic (-1 >>> 8) should give us 00000000 which is 0
Well not so:
byte b = -1;
System.out.println("-1 >>> 8 = " + (b >>> 8));
The output I get is:
-1 >> 8 = 16777215
Hmmm. what just happened? Java converted the signed byte into a signed int, and then did an arithmetic right shift of 8 bits.
So Java converted -1 to a signed 32 bit integer:
1111111111111111111111111111111
Then did a logical right shift of 8 bits getting
00000000111111111111111111111111
which is: 16777215 in base 10
ok, let's try casting the output back into a byte
byte b = -1;
System.out.println("-1 >>> 8 = " + (byte)(b >>> 8));
The output is:
-1 >> 8 = -1
That did not help because the lower 8 bits of the answer are still all 1's, so casting to a byte gives us -1.
ok, so how do I get the 0 I was after? We can get it by bit masking the byte.
byte x = -1;
System.out.println("-1 >>> 8 = " + ((x&0xFF) >>> 8));
Running the above code gives us an output of:
-1 >>> 8 = 0
So what just happened? b is still converted into a signed 32 bit integer, giving us:
1111111111111111111111111111111
but then we mask it with 0xFF, which gives us
0000000000000000000000011111111
Now when we do a logical right shift of 8 bits, we get
0000000000000000000000000000000
I hope this post helps me remember bit wise operations in Java, and I hope it helps you too. If you have a problem remembering things like I do, you may want to create a little example code and blog about it yourself.
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