What does the caret operator (^) in Python do?

Question

I ran across the caret operator in python today and trying it out, I got the following output:

>>> 8^3
11
>>> 8^4
12
>>> 8^1
9
>         


        

Answer 1

It's a bit-by-bit exclusive-or. Binary bitwise operators are documented in chapter 5 of the Python Language Reference.