Position of least significant bit that is set

Question

I am looking for an efficient way to determine the position of the least significant bit that is set in an integer, e.g. for 0x0FF0 it would be 4.

A trivial impleme

Answer 1

Found this clever trick using 'magic masks' in "The art of programming, part 4", which does it in O(log(n)) time for n-bit number. [with log(n) extra space]. Typical solutions checking for the set bit is either O(n) or need O(n) extra space for a look up table, so this is a good compromise.

Magic masks:

m0 = (...............01010101)  
m1 = (...............00110011)
m2 = (...............00001111)  
m3 = (.......0000000011111111)
....

Key idea: No of trailing zeros in x = 1 * [(x & m0) = 0] + 2 * [(x & m1) = 0] + 4 * [(x & m2) = 0] + ...

int lastSetBitPos(const uint64_t x) {
    if (x == 0)  return -1;

    //For 64 bit number, log2(64)-1, ie; 5 masks needed
    int steps = log2(sizeof(x) * 8); assert(steps == 6);
    //magic masks
    uint64_t m[] = { 0x5555555555555555, //     .... 010101
                     0x3333333333333333, //     .....110011
                     0x0f0f0f0f0f0f0f0f, //     ...00001111
                     0x00ff00ff00ff00ff, //0000000011111111 
                     0x0000ffff0000ffff, 
                     0x00000000ffffffff };

    //Firstly extract only the last set bit
    uint64_t y = x & -x;

    int trailZeros = 0, i = 0 , factor = 0;
    while (i < steps) {
        factor = ((y & m[i]) == 0 ) ? 1 : 0;
        trailZeros += factor * pow(2,i);
        ++i;
    }
    return (trailZeros+1);
}