CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptbinarybit-manipulation
Me myself and I
Me myself and I

Reputation: 4070

First time using binary having trouble?

Why does this return 10010 instead of 00001?

0110 >> 2 // 10010

I thought the bits would be shifted to the right 2 times, but they're not. The output I expected was 0001 or 1 but I got 0 instead. Why is this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 82

Answers (2)

FatalError
FatalError

Reputation: 54551

Your number is not being interpreted as binary, but rather octal (base 8). Octal 0110 is 72 in decimal, or 1001000 in binary. When you right shift by 2, that becomes 10010 as you are seeing.

It's common in programming languages that a leading zero means octal. Depending on the language you are using, there may or may not be a way to specify a binary literal.

A more universal way to express a binary number would be using hex since each nibble (hex digit) is exactly 4 bits.

0 0000
1 0001
2 0010
3 0011
4 0100
5 0101
6 0110
7 0111
8 1000
9 1001
A 1010
B 1011
C 1100
D 1101
E 1110
F 1111

So, to make 0110 (binary) we'd use 0x6. To make 01101101 we'd use 0x6D.

Upvotes: 1

nneonneo
nneonneo

Reputation: 179452

0110 is an octal constant because it starts with a zero:

>>> 0110
72
>>> 0110 >> 2
18
>>> bin(_)
'0b10010'

This is Python, but the same is true of many other languages with octal constants (Java, C, JavaScript, ...). Not all languages provide binary constants. If you don't have them, you can use hexadecimal constants instead (0b0110 is 0x6, for example).

Upvotes: 2

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