I cannot figure out why this works. I am attempting to mask the least significant 32 bits of java on a long but it does not properly AND the 33rd and 34th bit and further. Here is my example
class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
long someVal = 17592096894893l; //hex 0xFFFFAAFAFAD
long mask = 0xFF; //binary
long result = mask & someVal;
System.out.println("Example 1 this works on one byte");
System.out.printf("\n%x %s", someVal, Long.toBinaryString(someVal) );
System.out.printf("\n%x %s", result, Long.toBinaryString(result) );
long someVal2 = 17592096894893l; //hex 0xFFFFAAFAFAD
mask = 0xFFFFFFFF; //binary
result = mask & someVal2;
System.out.println("\nExample 2 - this does not work");
System.out.printf("\n%x %s", someVal2, Long.toBinaryString(someVal2) );
System.out.printf("\n%x %s", result, Long.toBinaryString(result) );
}
}
I was expecting the results to drop the most significant byte to be a zero since the AND operation did it on 32 bits. Here is the output I get.
Example 1 - this works
ffffaafafad 11111111111111111010101011111010111110101101
ad 10101101
Example 2 - this does not work
ffffaafafad 11111111111111111010101011111010111110101101
ffffaafafad 11111111111111111010101011111010111110101101
I would like to be able to mask the first least significant 4 bytes of the long value.
I believe what you’re seeing here is the fact that Java converts integers to longs using sign extension.
For starters, what should this code do?
int myInt = -1;
long myLong = myInt;
System.out.println(myLong);
This should intuitively print out -1, and that’s indeed what happens. I mean, it would be kinda weird if in converting an int to a long, we didn’t get the same number we started with.
Now, let’s take this code:
int myInt = 0xFFFFFFFF;
long myLong = myInt;
System.out.println(myLong);
What does this print? Well, 0xFFFFFFFF is the hexadecimal version of the signed 32-bit number -1. That means that this code is completely equivalent to the above code, so it should (and does) print the same value, -1.
But the value -1, encoded as a long, doesn’t have representation 0x00000000FFFFFFFF. That would be 232 - 1, not -1. Rather, since it’s 64 bits long, -1 is represented as 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. Oops - all the upper bits just got activated! That makes it not very effective as a bitmask.
The rule in Java is that if you convert an int to a long, if the very first bit of the int is 1, then all 32 upper bits of the long will get set to 1 as well. That’s in place so that converting an integer to a long preserves the numeric value.
If you want to make a bitmask that’s actually 64 bits long, initialize it with a long literal rather than an int literal:
mask = 0xFFFFFFFFL; // note the L
Why does this make a difference? Without the L, Java treats the code as
However, if you include the L, Java interprets things like this:
Hope this helps!