The XOR (Exclusive OR) operation is a fundamental bitwise operation used in many computer-related tasks, such as cryptography, error detection, and data manipulation. In Python, the XOR operation can be performed using the ^ operator. In this blog post, we will explore how to perform XOR operations in Python using various methods and techniques.
1. Basic XOR operation on integers
To perform a bitwise XOR on two integers, we can simply use the ^ operator between the two numbers. Let’s consider the following example:
a = 5 # binary: 0101
b = 3 # binary: 0011
result = a ^ b # binary: 0110 (6 in decimal)
print(result) # Output: 6
2. XOR operation on binary strings
When working with binary strings, we can perform the XOR operation using list comprehensions and the ^ operator on the individual bits of the binary strings. Let’s consider the following example:
a = '1011'
b = '1100'
result = ''.join([str(int(bit_a) ^ int(bit_b)) for bit_a, bit_b in zip(a, b)])
print(result) # Output: '0111'
In this example, we are iterating over each bit of the binary strings a and b using the zip() function. We then perform the XOR operation on each pair of bits using the ^ operator and join the result using the join() method to create the final XORed binary string.
3. XOR operation on byte strings
When working with byte strings, we can perform the XOR operation using the bytearray() function and the same list comprehension technique we used for binary strings. Let’s consider the following example:
a = b'Hello, World!'
b = b'xor-key-12345'
result = bytearray([byte_a ^ byte_b for byte_a, byte_b in zip(a, b)])
print(result) # Output: bytearray(b'\x1d\x0e\x0f\nC\x0c\x07AA\x1b\x1a\x1a')
In this example, we create a bytearray by iterating over each byte of the byte strings a and b using the zip() function. We then perform the XOR operation on each pair of bytes using the ^ operator and store the result in the bytearray.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have discussed how to perform XOR operations in Python using the ^ operator on integers, binary strings, and byte strings. By making use of Python’s built-in functions and list comprehensions, we can easily perform XOR operations for various use cases, such as cryptography and data manipulation.