Boolean operators vs Bitwise operators

Question

I am confused as to when I should use Boolean vs bitwise operators

• and vs &
• or vs |

Answer 1

If you are trying to do element-wise boolean operations in numpy, the answer is somewhat different. You can use & and | for element-wise boolean operations, but and and or will return value error.

To be on the safe side, you can use the numpy logic functions.

np.array([True, False, True]) | np.array([True, False, False])
# array([ True, False,  True], dtype=bool)

np.array([True, False, True]) or np.array([True, False, False])
# ValueError: The truth value of an array with more than one element is ambiguous. Use a.any() or a.all()

np.logical_or(np.array([True, False, True]), np.array([True, False, False]))
# array([ True, False,  True], dtype=bool)