Skip to main content

OR Operator

Bitwise OR, Computations, and Examples

2 min read

Here, we will discuss the '|' operator in detail.

Introduction

A Bitwise OR is a binary operator that takes two-bit patterns of equal length and performs the logical inclusive OR operation on each corresponding bits pair. The result in each position is 0 if both bits are 0. Otherwise, the result is 1.

Bitwise OR

The Bitwise OR operator does the following:

  • It is a binary operator that takes two numbers.
  • When we do Bitwise | of those two numbers, it considers the binary representation of these two numbers.
  • The Bitwise OR operator compares bit by bit in binary representation, and whatever binary representation you get, the corresponding integer is returned as an output.

The integer data type takes 4 bytes in C, C++, and Java programming languages.

4 Bytes = 4 * (8 bits) = 32 bits. {1 Byte = 8 bits}

Let’s see one of the above examples in binary representation.

Example

For simplicity, let’s represent these in 16-bit instead of 32-bit binary. We are going one step at a time. In each of these illustrations, we see the right-most significant bit is calculated.

Illustration

a = 12
b = 10
---------------------------------
a in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1100
b in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1010
---------------------------------
a | b       :                   0
---------------------------------

a = 12
b = 10
---------------------------------
a in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1100
b in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1010
---------------------------------
a | b       :                  10
---------------------------------
a = 12
b = 10
---------------------------------
a in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1100
b in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1010
---------------------------------
a | b       :                 110
---------------------------------
a = 12
b = 10
---------------------------------
a in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1100
b in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1010
---------------------------------
a | b       :                1110
---------------------------------
a = 12
b = 10
---------------------------------
a in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1100
b in Binary : 0000 0000 0000 1010
---------------------------------
a | b       : 0000 0000 0000 1110
---------------------------------

The | operation starts from the rightmost bit traversing towards the leftmost bit in the 32-bit binary representation, as represented above.

Below is the code representation of the | operator.

Code

Java

class OROperation {
    private static int helper(int x, int y) {
        return x | y;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int x = 12;
        int y = 10;
        System.out.println("Bitwise OR of " + x + ", " + y + " is: " + helper(x, y)); // yields to 14
    }
}

// Output : Bitwise OR of 12, 10 is: 14

Python

def OrOperation(x,y):
    return x|y

x=12
y=10
print("Bitwise OR of ",x ,",",y,"is : ",OrOperation(x,y))

JavaScript

const OrOperation = (x, y) => x | y;

const x = 12;
const y = 10;

console.log (`Bitwise OR of ${x}, ${y} is = ${OrOperation (x, y)}`);

// Output : Bitwise OR of 12, 10 is = 14

C++

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int helper(int x, int y){
  return x | y;
}

int main(){
  int x = 12, y = 10;
  cout << "Bitwise OR of " << x << " , " << y << " is " << helper(x, y);
  return 0;
  
// Output : Bitwise OR of 12, 10 is = 14

TypeScript

export const OrOperation = (x: number, y: number): number => x | y;

const x: number = 12;
const y: number = 10;

console.log(`Bitwise OR of ${x}, ${y} is = ${OrOperation(x, y)}`);

// Output : Bitwise OR of 12, 10 is = 14

The following lesson will apply the Bitwise approach to solve a few problems.

Let’s jump into our first problem using the Bitwise | operator.

Reading Progress