If you want to do bit manipulation in Lua, you can use the bit32 library (which is loaded as a table) from Lua 5.2, and it's backported to newer Lua 5.1 versions as well. Bit manipulation is particularly useful in applications where data is packed into a series of bytes - in effect an array of booleans.

Let's see some of them in use - we have the "classic" and, or, exclusive or and not:

  wizard:j graham$ lua52
  Lua 5.2.0 Copyright (C) 1994-2011 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
  > value = 0xffff0000
  > nothr = 0x00ffff00
  > = string.format("%08x",bit32.band(value,nothr))
  00ff0000
  > = string.format("%08x",bit32.bor(value,nothr))
  ffffff00
  > = string.format("%08x",bit32.bxor(value,nothr))
  ff00ff00
  > = string.format("%08x",bit32.bnot(nothr))
  ff0000ff

We have shifts and rotates:
• lshift - left shift
• alshift - arithmetic left shift; special consideration for sign bit
• lrotate - left shift, rotating bits that fall off the end
and the equivalent right shifts too.

There's an example of some of these in use in a program [here] - combining bitwise operators with other Lua features.

The bit32 library also includes operators to extract and even replace bits - illustrated below using hex values to make it clearer to see what is happening, but you may in practise choose any boundaries.

  Lua 5.2.0 Copyright (C) 1994-2011 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
  > value = 0xfe84c372
  > = bit32.extract(value,8,4)
  3
  > = bit32.extract(value,8,8)
  > = string.format("%x",bit32.extract(value,8,8))
  c3
  > = string.format("%x",bit32.replace(value,0x95,12,8))
  fe895372
(written 2012-04-06)

 U198 - New in Lua 5.2
  [3683] Weak references in Lua - what are they, and why use them? - (2012-04-04)
  [3686] The goto statement in Lua - (2012-04-06)
  [3690] Changes in Lua 5.2 - Garbage Collection - (2012-04-08)

U108 - Lua - Pattern matching
  [1744] Lua examples, Lua Courses - (2008-08-08)
  [1847] Lua - IAQ (Infrequently Answered Questions) - (2008-10-18)
  [2383] Lua Regular Expressions - (2009-08-28)
  [2702] First and last match with Regular Expressions - (2010-04-02)
  [2727] Making a Lua program run more than 10 times faster - (2010-04-16)
  [4366] Changing what operators do on objects - a comparison across different programming languages - (2014-12-26)

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