Setting a bit
Use the bitwise OR operator (|
) to set a bit.
number |= 1UL << n;
That will set the n
th bit of number
. n
should be zero, if you want to set the 1
st bit and so on upto n-1
, if you want to set the n
th bit.
Use 1ULL
if number
is wider than unsigned long
; promotion of 1UL << n
doesn't happen until after evaluating 1UL << n
where it's undefined behaviour to shift by more than the width of a long
. The same applies to all the rest of the examples.
Clearing a bit
Use the bitwise AND operator (&
) to clear a bit.
number &= ~(1UL << n);
That will clear the n
th bit of number
. You must invert the bit string with the bitwise NOT operator (~
), then AND it.
Toggling a bit
The XOR operator (^
) can be used to toggle a bit.
number ^= 1UL << n;
That will toggle the n
th bit of number
.
Checking a bit
You didn't ask for this, but I might as well add it.
To check a bit, shift the number n to the right, then bitwise AND it:
bit = (number >> n) & 1U;
That will put the value of the n
th bit of number
into the variable bit
.
Changing the nth bit to x
Setting the n
th bit to either 1
or 0
can be achieved with the following on a 2's complement C++ implementation:
number ^= (-x ^ number) & (1UL << n);
Bit n
will be set if x
is 1
, and cleared if x
is 0
. If x
has some other value, you get garbage. x = !!x
will booleanize it to 0 or 1.
To make this independent of 2's complement negation behaviour (where -1
has all bits set, unlike on a 1's complement or sign/magnitude C++ implementation), use unsigned negation.
number ^= (-(unsigned long)x ^ number) & (1UL << n);
or
unsigned long newbit = !!x; // Also booleanize to force 0 or 1
number ^= (-newbit ^ number) & (1UL << n);
It's generally a good idea to use unsigned types for portable bit manipulation.
or
number = (number & ~(1UL << n)) | (x << n);
(number & ~(1UL << n))
will clear the n
th bit and (x << n)
will set the n
th bit to x
.
It's also generally a good idea to not to copy/paste code in general and so many people use preprocessor macros (like the community wiki answer further down) or some sort of encapsulation.
I use this to split string by a delimiter. The first puts the results in a pre-constructed vector, the second returns a new vector.
#include <string>
#include <sstream>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
template <typename Out>
void split(const std::string &s, char delim, Out result) {
std::istringstream iss(s);
std::string item;
while (std::getline(iss, item, delim)) {
*result++ = item;
}
}
std::vector<std::string> split(const std::string &s, char delim) {
std::vector<std::string> elems;
split(s, delim, std::back_inserter(elems));
return elems;
}
Note that this solution does not skip empty tokens, so the following will find 4 items, one of which is empty:
std::vector<std::string> x = split("one:two::three", ':');
Best Answer
On many operating systems, it's simply impossible, so C++ doesn't support it. You'll have to write your own
streambuf
. If the only platform you're worried about is Windows, you can possibly use the exclusive mode for opening that it offers. More likely, however, you would want to use some sort of file locking, which is more precise, and is available on most, if not all platforms (but not portably—you'll needLockFileEx
under Windows,fcntl
under Unix).Under Posix, you could also use
pthread_rwlock
. Butenhof gives an implementation of this using classical mutex and condition variables, which are present in C++11, so you could actually implement a portable version (provided all of the readers and writers are in the same process—the Posix requests will work across process boundaries, but this is not true for the C++ threading primitives).