Bitwise operators

Question

What are these bitwise operators?
How can they be used?
bitwise and &
bitwise or |
bitwise complement ~
bitwise XOR ^
I cannot understand them even after some surfing.

Answer 1

9 in binary is 1001, 3 in binary is 0011, so I will try to align them as follows,
1001
0011
From the four binary numbers, you can assume that 1 is true, 0 is false. So, 9 & 3 will be 0001, which is 1.
Similary, 9 | 3 will be 1011 which is 11.
9 ^ 3 will be 1010 which is 10.
~9 will be 0110.
To be honest, I don't even know what's the use of this...

(In case you don't know XOR, XOR works if both inputs are different.)

Answer 2

I written simple program to demonstrate these operators. so please in my code playground(logical gates in c++) and let me know if you have doubt or not clear with the concepts. Then elaborate it further.

Hope it will be useful and understand the concept well and good

Answer 3

bitwise operators are special type of operators that first convert your given operands(numbers) into binary and then apply the operator ......eg
lets say we have 2 nos. viz. 10 and 12.
let us apply bitwise AND...
Binary equivalent of 10 is 1010
and that of 12 is 1100
now we will apply AND bit by bit as follows....
10 & 12 is evaluated as follows :
1 AND 1 is 1
0 AND 1 is 0
1 AND 0 is 0
0 AND 0 is 0
thus answer is 1000
now converting this binary number into decimal number we get 8
thus 10 & 12 gives 8
Similarly OR and XOR can be applied.....
Hope this helps...
Any doubt.....do ask!