Rotating Bits

[Dion Adler]

Hello everyone,

I was just wondering if someone could help me figure out how to write a function that rotates bits in Java while carrying over. For example, if I had :

int test = 0x41; //00000000000000000000000001000001 <-- 65

and I wanted to rotate to the right by 3( could be any number, just an example), then I want the number to turn out to:

00100000000000000000000000001000 <-- 536870920

Using the bit shift operators fills the variable with zeroes when the ones fall off. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Hi,

Welcome to JavaRanch!

You may not have read our naming policy on the way in. It requires that you use a full, real (sounding) first and last name for your display name. Initials aren't enough. You can change your display name here. Thanks!

[William Brogden]

Think about how to detect the fact that you are about to rotate a zero or a 1 bit out of the least significant bit. Think about how to place a zero or a 1 bit in the most significant bit.

[James Sabre]

Cross post - http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=757715&tstart=0

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

 

Originally posted by James Sabre:
Cross post - http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=757715&tstart=0

We don't really discourage this. We don't want people to post the same question in more than one forum at JavaRanch, but posting in the Sun forums and also here -- it's OK.

[Dion Adler]

Thanks for the help, and being so good about the cross posting. But as you can see, Sabre also posted in my sun forums post, though offered no real help. I don't see what would tempt someone to say someone is posting their hw when they do not know/have never met the person, thus have no idea who they are and what they do. And once again, showing his immaturity he decided to state in this forum that I was cross-posting. I don't know who Sabre is or what I ever did to him to deserve his disdain, but as I stated in the sun forum, if you don't have anything useful to say, don't say anything.

[Jesper de Jong]

Since Java 5.0, the class java.lang.Integer has methods rotateLeft(...) and rotateRight(...) that rotate the bits in an integer. Look those methods up in the API documentation.

[Peter Chase]

If you can't use Java 5, it is not terribly difficult to do rotation.

For the example of rotating a 32-bit integer right by 3...

Take the original number and shift left by 32-3=29 bits. Remember this as A.

Take the original number and shift right by 3 bits. Use the >>> operator, so the top 3 bits are definitely zero after the shift. Call this B.

Your result is A ORed with B.

[Dion Adler]

Thank you soooooo much!! That worked perfectly. You're a binary god!
[ August 04, 2006: Message edited by: Dion Adler ]