C++14 brings us fewer but useful features to modern C++ than the standards preceding it. The creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup says that improvements in C++14 were deliberately lower in quantity compared to C++11. One of the small but useful features is the introduction of “Binary Literals”. C++14 comes with the Binary Literals feature, and in this post, we explain how we can use binary bits.
Learn how to use binary literals in modern C++
A binary literal is an integer literal that your binary number begins with 0b or 0B and consists of a sequence of binary digits (base two). It is defined in <bitset> and provides a convenient way to represent a binary base-2 number (1 and 0), useful for the developers in IDE, and useful to compilers that understand it is a binary value.
Here is a simple example of how we can use it.
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#include <bitset> int main(){ int b1 = 0b00111011; } |
Is there a simple example about how to use binary literals in modern C++?
We can use it with digital separators, which are another feature of C++. Here is an example, this time we used constants.
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const int b8 = 0b1111'0000; const int b16 = 0b1111'0000'1111'0000; const int b32 = 0b1111'0000'1111'0000'1111'0000'1111'0000; |
Note that, we can NOT use digital separator after the 0b literal as below.
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const int b8 = 0b'1111'0000; |
Is there a full example about how to use binary literals in modern C++?
Here is a full example about how to use binary literals in C++.
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#include <iostream> #include <bitset> int main() { int b = 0b00111011; int b8 = 0b1111'0000; int b16 = 0b1111'0000'1111'0000; int b32 = 0b1111'0000'1111'0000'1111'0000'1111'0000; std::cout << std::bitset<8>(b8) << std::endl; std::cout << std::bitset<16>(b16) << std::endl; std::cout << std::bitset<32>(b32) << std::endl; system("pause"); return 0; } |
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11110000 1111000011110000 11110000111100001111000011110000 |
For more details about the binary literals, please see https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n3472.pdf
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