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Bitwise OR Assignment Operator (|=)

Visual Studio 2010

Performs a bitwise OR on the value of a variable and the value of an expression and assigns the result to the variable.

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result |= expression

result

Any numeric variable.

expression

Any numeric expression.

Using this operator is almost the same as specifying result = result | expression, except that result is only evaluated once.

The |= operator coerces the arguments to matching data types. Then the |= operator looks at the binary representation of the values of result and expression and does a bitwise OR operation on them. The result of this operation behaves like this:

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0101    (result)
1100    (expression)
----
1101    (output)

Any time either of the expressions has a 1 in a digit, the result has a 1 in that digit. Otherwise, the result has a 0 in that digit.

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