BITWISE OPERATOR IN PYTHON

The bitwise operator in python performs bit by bit operation on the values of the two operands. If we assign a = 5 and b = 4 then in bitwise operations a stores the value as 0101 and b as 0100. suppose we are going to do binary and (&) on a and b :

>>> a = 5
>>> b = 6
>>> print (" binary and i.e a&b is ",a&b)

OUTPUT:
 binary and i.e a&b is  4

Lets see how bitwise operator in python works :

a = 0100
b = 0101
a&b =     0100
        & 0101
       ----------
          0100  i.e. 4

These bitwise operator only make sense in terms of the binary representation of numbers. Lets go through some of the bitwise operator examples:

>>> a = 5
>>> b = 6
>>> print ("binary and i.e. a&b is:", a&b)
>>> print ("binary or i.e. a|b is:", a|b)
>>> print ("binary xor i.e. a^b is:", a^b)
>>> print ("binary not i.e. ~b is:", ~b)
>>> print ("binary leftshift of 5 by 6 units i.e. a<<b is:", a<<b)

OUTPUT:

binary and i.e. a&b is: 4
binary or i.e. a|b is: 7
binary xor i.e. a^b is: 3
binary not i.e. ~b is: -7
binary leftshift of 5 by 6 units i.e. a<<b is: 320

User think a^b as b is exponent of a i.e. a b , but these are different term. ‘^’ denotes bitwise XOR operation in python whereas ‘ ** ‘ denotes exponent