Today I Learned - Rocky Kev

TIL the XOR operator in Javascript

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TAGS: javascript math

The bitwise XOR operator (^) returns a 1 in each bit position for which the corresponding bits of either but not both operands are 1s.
The operands are converted to 32-bit integers and expressed by a series of bits (zeroes and ones).

const a = 5;        // 00000000000000000000000000000101
const b = 3;        // 00000000000000000000000000000011

console.log(a ^ b); // 00000000000000000000000000000110
// expected output: 6

I haven't really found real good use-cases of why a person would use it.
As noted in a comment, "XOR is a pretty neat party trick."

But it's used in Cryptographic algorithms.

XOR is used in cryptography for two main reasons: it is reversible e.g if A xor with B results in C then A xor with C will give B. it makes equal probability of 0 and 1 unlike AND & OR. if AND is used, there are 75% chances of output 0 and 25% of 1,if OR is used, there are 75% chances of output 1 and 25% of 0 so '1' and '0' output is not uniformly distributed and thus will not create randomness.
https://security.stackexchange.com/a/220699

MDN:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Bitwise_XOR

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