How can bit masking be implemented in Python?

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Bit masking can be implemented in Python using the bitwise operators such as bitwise and (&), bitwise or (|), bitwise xor (^), bitwise not (~), and left shift (<<) and right shift (>>).

To set a particular bit in a number to 1, we can use the bitwise or operation with the corresponding bit position. For example, to set the 3rd bit of a number to 1, we can use the following code:

num = 5 # binary representation is 101 mask = 1 << 3 # shift 1 by 3 bits to get the mask 1000 num = num | mask # bitwise or operation to set the 3rd bit to 1 print(num) # output is 13, binary representation is 1101

To clear a particular bit in a number to 0, we can use the bitwise and operation with the inverted mask. For example, to clear the 3rd bit of a number to 0, we can use the following code:

num = 13 # binary representation is 1101 mask = ~(1 << 3) # shift 1 by 3 bits, invert it to get the mask 0111 num = num & mask # bitwise and operation to clear the 3rd bit to 0 print(num) # output is 5, binary representation is 0101

Other bitwise operations can be similarly implemented to manipulate the bits of a number in Python.