Need Help with Python Assignment Operator (&)

Data Science
1

I’m learning Python assignment operators. Why is the result of the operation below equal to 2? Please give me detail.

print(2 & 3)

2

& is not an assignment operator, but a bitwise AND operator. It returns a number of all the bits that its two operands have set in common.

0b10  =>  2
0b11  =>  3
  ^
   \
common bit

The common bit is in the two’s placeholder.

0b1000  =>  8
0b0111  =>  7

Note that 7 & 8 => 0 since they have no bits in common.

  0b1010  =>  10
& 0b1111  =>  15
_ 0b1010

10 & 15  =>  10

  0b1111  =>  15
& 0b0111  =>   7
_ 0b0111

15 & 7  =>  7

Note that ANDing two binary numbers will never give a result greater than the smaller of the two numbers.

Side note. Bitwise ANDing any number with 1 will tell us if the number is odd.

22 & 1  =>  0
23 & 1  =>  1
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