I would like to perform a bitwise OR on two string representations of binary numbers, but I can't figure out how to convert the strings into raw binary.
a = '010110'
b = '100000'
a | b
should yield: 110110
I then want to count the number of on bits.
This should return:
4
You can convert the strings to binary using the built-in int() function and passing 2 as the base:
a = int('010110', 2)
b = int('100000', 2)
then OR the two values and count the bits by converting to a string and counting the "1" characters:
print bin(a | b).count("1")
You could write a custom class derived from str and override its magic method responsible for the binary OR operator |.
There are many ways to implement the OR. The probably easiest one was already described by @samgak in his answer, you can use int with specifying the base number as 2 and then use its | operator:
class bitstr(str)
def __or__(self, other):
return bin(int(self, 2) | int(other, 2))[2:]
# need to slice because 'bin' prefixes the result string with "0b".
This is how you could use it:
a = '010110'
b = bitstr('100000')
print(bitstr(a) | b)
# Output: 110110
You see that you need a conversion to bitstr somewhere, but it does not matter at which point. Also, for all other operations except the | operator, our custom bitstr behaves exactly like a normal str string, so you could use that everywhere if you want.
