Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real projects?

Question

Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real programming projects? Most (if not all) high level languages have shift operators in them, but when would you actually need to

Answer 1

Yes, I have. As you might suspect it's most likely to be found in low level programming, for example developing devices' drivers. But, I worked on a C# project where I had to develop a web service that received data from medical devices. All the binary data that device stored was encoded into SOAP packets, but the binary data was compressed and encoded. So to uncompress it, you would have to do lots and lots of bit manipulations. And furthermore you would have to do lots of bit shifting to parse out any useful information, for example device serial number is a lower half of the second byte or something like that. Also I've seen some people in .NET (C#) world make a use of Bit masking and Flag Attribute, I personally never had an urge to do it.