Hey everyone;

I've seen in several C programs the use of *^ and >> to manipulate numbers. I've seen *^ in XOR applications and >> in computing checksums in packet headers. What does *^ and >> or << do? Any help would be appreciated


-GSD

Not sure what *^ is but ^ is the XOR operator. you'd do something like some_int ^ some_other_int.

XOR works like AND and OR but only returns true if both bits are different, so you get like:
0 ^ 0 = 0
0 ^ 1 = 1
1 ^ 0 = 1
1 ^ 1 = 0

Here's an example:
1011
1001
------
0010

>> and << are bit shift operators. >> will shift all the bits in the integer to the right a specified number of times and << will shift the bits left a specified number of times. For instance if you had:

0x59 (01011001 in binary)

you could do 0x59 << 1 to shift all the bits to the left resulting in 10110010 (0xB2 in hex).

I don't think *^ is a valid operator in C++; perhaps there is some way it can be read as a combination of two operators? I can't think of any situations where * would not have a right-hand operand, though. I'd be interested to see the context you saw it in. ^= is the operator for assigning a value using XOR.

As itsme says, though >> is a bitshift operator; it is also overloaded with other meanings, such as when they're used for stream extraction and stream insertion:

In C++, you can overload any operator to do anything you want; I'm sure there are other meanings for most operators. But AFAIK you can't create new ones.

Hey, thanks for all the replies. I wrote the symbol "^*" wrong, I mean "^=" and "*=". I had a feeling ^= was XOR operations. Thanks for the replies guys and thanks for clearing things up for me.

-GSD

^= and *= or shortcut asignment operators.

If you had a = a * b you could write it as a *= b.
If you had num1 = num1 ^ num2 you could write it as num1 ^= num2.

It works with any binary operator. It's when you're doing <operand1> = <operand1> <operator> <operand2>.