A mask defines which bits you want to keep, and which bits you want to clear. Masking is the act of applying a mask to a value. This is accomplished by doing: Bitwise ANDing in order to extract a subset of the bits in the value Bitwise ORing in order to set a subset of the bits in the value Bitwise XORing in order to toggle a subset of the bits in the value Masking bits to 1 ---------------------------- To turn certain bits on, the bitwise OR operation can be used, following the principle that Y OR 1 = 1 and Y OR 0 = Y. Therefore, to make sure a bit is on, OR can be used with a 1. To leave a bit unchanged, OR is used with a 0. Example: Masking on the higher nibble (bits 4, 5, 6, 7) the lower nibble (bits 0, 1, 2, 3) unchanged. 10010101 10100101 OR 11110000 11110000 = 11110101 11110101 Masking bits to 0 ---------------------------- More often in practice bits are "masked off" (or masked to 0) than "masked on" (or masked to 1). When a bit is ANDed with a 0, the result is always 0, i.e. Y AND 0 = 0. To leave the other bits as they were originally, they can be ANDed with 1, since Y AND 1 = Y. Example: Masking off the higher nibble (bits 4, 5, 6, 7) the lower nibble (bits 0, 1, 2, 3) unchanged. 10100101 10100101 AND 00001111 00001111 = 00000101 00000101 Querying the status of a bit ---------------------------- It is possible to use bitmasks to easily check the state of individual bits regardless of the other bits. To do this, turning off all the other bits using the bitwise AND is done as discussed above and the value is compared with 1. If it is equal to 0, then the bit was off, but if the value is any other value, then the bit was on. What makes this convenient is that it is not necessary to figure out what the value actually is, just that it is not 0. Example: Querying the status of the 4th bit 10011101 10010101 AND 00001000 00001000 = 00001000 00000000 Toggling bit values ---------------------------- So far the article has covered how to turn bits on and turn bits off, but not both at once. Sometimes it does not really matter what the value is, but it must be made the opposite of what it currently is. This can be achieved using the XOR (exclusive or) operation. XOR returns 1 if and only if an odd number of bits are 1. Therefore, if two corresponding bits are 1, the result will be a 0, but if only one of them is 1, the result will be 1. Therefore inversion of the values of bits is done by XORing them with a 1. If the original bit was 1, it returns 1 XOR 1 = 0. If the original bit was 0 it returns 0 XOR 1 = 1. Also note that XOR masking is bit-safe, meaning that it will not affect unmasked bits because Y XOR 0 = Y, just like an OR. Example: Toggling bit values 10011101 10010101 XOR 00001111 11111111 = 10010010 01101010 To write arbitrary 1s and 0s to a subset of bits, first write 0s to that subset, then set the high bits: