Bitwise OR operation
17 February 2024 (Updated 17 February 2024)
The Bitwise OR operation – commonly expressed as the symbol |– takes two bit patterns of equal length and performs the logical inclusive OR operation on each pair of corresponding bits.
The inclusive OR operation works as follows:
| Bit a | Bit b | Result |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
If either of the bits is 1, the result is 1. Otherwise, the result is 0.
For example, you can apply the bitwise OR operation in JavaScript on the numbers 170 and 204 using:
170 | 204
// 238This is equivalent to:
10101010 (170)
OR 11001100 (204)
-----------
11101110 (238)
Tagged:
Computing