Bitwise operators >> and << in Python

Question

In one of the quiz challenges, I got the following question:
What is the output of this code?
x = 5
print (x >> 2 << x)

The answer was 32.

I don't really understand, how this works... Additionally I would have expected that it would print 0s and 1s, why is it converted back to an integer?

Thank you! Any help is appreciated :)

Answer 1

x = 5 = 0b101
>> 2 # shifted 2 bits to the right it becomes 0b1 = 1
<< x # shifted 5 bits to the left. x is substituted here before shift operations begin that's why it is shifted 5 bits
# it becomes 0b100000 = 32

you was expecting it to print 0b100000 but the function print() outputs such numbers in decimal by default.
That's why 32 is printed out.

Answer 2

The >> and << operators represent shifting the bit equivalent to the left or right of a number or character.

For example:

10 in binary is: 1010
10 shifted right (>>) is: 0101
0101 in binary is: 5