Flag bit computation and detection
- by Majid
Hi all,
In some code I'm working on I should take care of ten independent parameters which can take one of two values (0 or 1). This creates 2^10 distinct conditions. Some of the conditions never occur and can be left out, but those which do occur are still A LOT and making a switch to handle all cases is insane.
I want to use 10 if statements instead of a huge switch. For this I know I should use flag bits, or rather flag bytes as the language is javascript and its easier to work with a 10 byte string with to represent a 10-bit binary.
Now, my problem is, I don't know how to implement this. I have seen this used in APIs where multiple-selectable options are exposed with numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, ... , n^(n-1) which are decimal equivalents of 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc. in binary. So if we make call like bar = foo(7), bar will be an object with whatever options the three rightmost flags enable.
I can convert the decimal number into binary and in each if statement check to see if the corresponding digit is set or not. But I wonder, is there a way to determine the n-th digit of a decimal number is zero or one in binary form, without actually doing the conversion?
