C# hexadecimal & comparison

Question

I ran into a bit of code similar to the code below and was just curious if someone could help me understand what it's doing?:

int flag = 5;
Console.WriteLine(0x0E & flag);
// 5 returns 4, 6 returns 4, 7 returns 6, 8 returns 8

Sandbox: https://dotnetfiddle.net/NnLyvJ

Answer 1

This is the bitwise AND operator. It performs an AND operation on the bits of a number.

A logical AND operation on two [boolean] values returns True if the two values are True; False otherwise.

A bitwise AND operation on two numbers returns a number from all the bits of the two numbers that are 1 (True) in both numbers.

Example:

5   = 101
4   = 100
AND = 100 = 4

Therefore, 5 & 4 = 4.

This logic is heavily used for storing flags, you just need to assign each flag a power of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, etc) so that each flag is stored in a different bit of the flags number, and then you just need to do flags & FLAG_VALUE and if the flag is set, it'll return FLAG_VALUE , otherwise 0 .

C# provides a "cleaner" way to do this using enum s and the Flags attribute.

[Flags]
public enum MyFlags
{
    Flag0 = 1 << 0, // using the bitwise shift operator to make it more readable
    Flag1 = 1 << 1,
    Flag2 = 1 << 2,
    Flag3 = 1 << 3,
}

void a()
{
    var flags = MyFlags.Flag0 | MyFlags.Flag1 | MyFlags.Flag3;
    Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString((int) flags, 2)); // prints the binary representation of flags, that is "1011" (in base 10 it's 11)
    Console.WriteLine(flags); // as the enum has the Flags attribute, it prints "Flag0, Flag1, Flag3" instead of treating it as an invalid value and printing "11"
    Console.WriteLine(flags.HasFlag(MyFlags.Flag1)); // the Flags attribute also provides the HasFlag function, which is syntactic sugar for doing "(flags & MyFlags.Flag1) != 0"
}

Excuse my bad english.