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
// 238
This is equivalent to:
10101010 (170)
OR 11001100 (204)
-----------
11101110 (238)