C Programming - XOR Bitwise Operation

Question

What operation does the following ‘C’ statement perform?

star = star ^ 0b00100100;

(A) Toggles bits 2 and 5 of

Answer 1

It is (A) toggles bits 2 and 5.

The following is the truth table for the XOR operation:

x  y  x^y
0  0   0
1  0   1
0  1   1
1  1   0

You can see from the table that x XOR 0 = x and x XOR 1 = !x.

XOR is a bitwise operation, so it operates on individual bits. Therefore if you XOR star with some constant, it will toggle the 1 bits in the constant.

You can find some explanation e.g. here.