C - Bitwise NOT operator

The Bitwise NOT operator (~) is an unary operator which takes a bit pattern and performs the logical NOT operation on each bit. It is used to invert all of the bits of the operand. It is interesting to note that for any integer x, ~x is the same as -(x + 1).

Bit	~ Bit
0	1
1	0

The example below describes how bitwise NOT operator works:


  528 -> 00000000000000000000001000010000 (in binary)
        ----------------------------------
 -529 <- 11111111111111111111110111101111 (in binary)

The code of using Bitwise NOT operator (~) is given below:

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main (){
  int x = 528;

  //Bitwise NOT operation
  int z = ~x;

  //Displaying the result
  printf("x = %d\n", x);
  printf("z = %d\n", z);
  return 0;
}

The output of the above code will be:

x = 528
z = -529

❮ C - Operators