Finding consecutive bit string of 1 or 0

Question

How to find the length of the longest consecutive bit string(either 1 or 0)?

00000000 11110000 00000000 00000000 -> If it is 0 then length will be 20

11111

Answer 1

One simple way would be to simply loop over the bits, and keep track of the number of bits in a row which have had the same value, and the maximum that this value has reached.

Here's a simple C function which does just this:

int num_conseq_matching_bits(int n) {
    int i, max, cur, b, prevb;
    prevb = n & 1; /* 0th bit */
    cur = 1;
    max = 1;
    for(i=1; i<32; i++) {
        b = (n >> i) & 1; /* get the i'th bit's value */
        if(b == prevb) {
            cur += 1;
            if(cur > max)
                max = cur;
        }
        else {
            cur = 1; /* count self */
            prevb = b;
        }
    }
    return max;
}