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This is the code I came up with.

I added comments to make the solution more verbose.

int findComplement(int num) {
    // b is the answer which will be returned
    int b = 0;

    // One bit will be taken at a time from num, will be inverted and stored in n for adding to result
    int n = 0;

    // k will be used to shift bit to be inserted in correct position
    int k = 0;

    while(num){
        // Invert bit of current number
        n = !(num & 1);

        // Shift the given number one bit right to accesss next bit in next iteration
        num = num >>1 ;

        // Add the inverted bit after shifting
        b = b + (n<<k);

        // Increment the number by which to shift next bit
        k++;
    }
    return b;
}

Is there any redundant statment in my code which can be removed? Or any other better logic to invert bits of a given integer

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  • 6
    \$\begingroup\$ Are you re-inventing the binary not operator (~)? \$\endgroup\$
    – Martin R
    Aug 10, 2019 at 17:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ I don't want to sound dumb, But honestly, I did not know that ~ operator existed which inverts all bits of a given integer. \$\endgroup\$
    – KshitijV97
    Aug 10, 2019 at 18:10
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ Many easy ways. ~num or -1 - num, or 0xFFFFFFFF - num, or 0xFFFFFFFF ^ num or (-1) ^ num. Doing it one bit at a time is most definitely the hard way. \$\endgroup\$
    – AJNeufeld
    Aug 10, 2019 at 19:17

1 Answer 1

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int n = 0; This initialization is not used. It could simply be int n;, or could be int n = !(num & 1); inside the loop, to restrict the scope of n.


This loop:

int k = 0;
while (num) {
    ...
    k++;
}

could be written as:

for(int k = 0; num; k++) {
    ...
}

Since you are doing bit manipulation, instead of using addition, you should probably use a “binary or” operation to merge the bit into your accumulator:

    b = b | (n << k);

or simply:

    b |= n << k;

Bug

You are not inverting the most significant zero bits. Assuming an 8-bit word size, the binary compliment of 9 (0b00001001) should be 0b11110110, not 0b00000110. And the compliment of that should return to the original number (0b00001001), but instead yields 0b00000001.


And, as mentioned by @Martin R, you could simply return ~num;

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