How does the bitwise complement operator (~ tilde) work?

Question

Why is it that ~2 is equal to -3? How does ~ operator work?

Answer 1

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The Bitwise complement operator(~) is a unary operator.

It works as per the following methods

First it converts the given decimal number to its corresponding binary value.That is in case of 2 it first convert 2 to 0000 0010 (to 8 bit binary number).

Then it converts all the 1 in the number to 0,and all the zeros to 1;then the number will become 1111 1101.

that is the 2's complement representation of -3.

In order to find the unsigned value using complement,i.e. simply to convert 1111 1101 to decimal (=4294967293) we can simply use the %u during printing.