The Bitwiser Object enables you to easy perform bitwise operations against any value. Bitwise operations are extremely useful. The chances are if you've ever looked into packing multiple values into a single integer or encrypt/decrypt data you would have come across bitwise operations.

So what are bitwise operations? Well first lets get into bits. A typical integer in a 32bit application will have 32 binary digits known as bits. These are 4 byte integers. There are also shorts (16bit/2 byte integers) and bytes/chars (8bit/1 byte integers) and even integers with more than 32bits such as 64bit, 128bit and so on. Each bit represents a value and they are totalled for the final value. So as you can see from just stated for every byte, 8 bits are used. Non-unicode characters (ASCII) utilise 1 byte to represent a character and unicode utilise 2 bytes to represent a character. So you can perform bitwise operations to encrypt a string of characters just as easy as you could to a value.

Let's take the letter 'A' for example:
A = 65 (0x41) in Binary: 01000001

As mentioned above the bits of a value represent a value and with the letter 'A' / value 65 2 flags are set. Windows based operating systems are little endian based values which means that we work right to left when working with binary. Apple Mac uses big endian which is left to right.

The first bit represents a value of 1. Then for every bit after that the value is doubled so 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on. When working in hexadecimal its a little easier to visualise 0x01, 0x02, 0x04, 0x08, 0x10, 0x20, 0x40, 0x80 and so on. So looking at 'A' 01000001 the 2 bits set are 1 (0x01) and 64 (0x40) totalling 65 (0x41).

So now you have a little understanding of how bits make up values I'll move onto bitwise operations. Bitwise operations are just operations that affect the bits in one way or another. A brief overview of each operation:

OR: Merges the bits of the 2 values. eg 01000001 ('A') OR 01000010 ('B') would return 01000011 ('C')
XOR: Toggles the bits of a value where the bits of the 2 overlap. eg 01000001 XOR 01000010 would return 00000011
AND: Clears the bits of a value where the bits of the 2nd value are not set. eg 10101010 AND 00111100 would return 00101000.
NOT: Inverts the bits of value. eg 11110000 would return 00001111
SHIFT: Moves the bits along in either left or right directions but when the bits move outside of their bounds they are truncated and lost. eg 00110110 Shift right 2 would return 00001101 then if shifted left 2 it would return 00110100.
ROTATE: Also known as circular shift, rotate is similar to shift except when the bits move out of bounds they wrap round. eg 00110110 rotate right 3 would return 11000110

Using a mixture of the operations on an integer can completely change its value. You could apply a rotate right, XOR with a value and then NOT. It then would be a matter of reversing the process (of course rotating left instead of right) to get it back to its original value. This is a basic encryption method employed with many packets that are sent between game clients and servers to protect the packet data. You could even store 4 x 1 byte values in a single integer. The above examples covered just a single byte but a 32bit integer would look like this 00100110111111101000110110000111 (654216583) 4 x 1 byte values could be extracted from this 00100110 (38), 11111110 (254), 10001101 (141), 10000111 (135). Or 8 x 4 bit values. 4 bits allows you to store a value of 0-15.