Comparing two characters using the & operator

Question

I am comparing the following two characters with &: '\u0874' 'a'

and I get ` as output. I know that 'a' in binary is 01000001 and '\u0874' in binary is(UTF-8 encoding) 11100000:10100001:10110100

How exactly does the & operator work here?

        char comp58 = 'a';
        char comp96 ='\u0874';
        Console.WriteLine(comp96&=comp58);

Answer 1

Firstly, note what what you're actually doing is anding comp96 with comp58 and assigning the result to comp96 by using the &= operator. Because of this, you are outputting a character rather than an integer.

Secondly, note that the characters in C# are using UTF16.

Thirdly, note that the UTF16 code for a is actually 00000000 01100001.

So the AND you're actually performing is:

00000000 01100001 'a'
00001000 01110100 '\u0874'
-----------------
00000000 01100000 Result

And 00000000 01100000 is the UTF16 code for "`" (grave/accent) which is what you're seeing as the output.

Note that if you changed your code to:

Console.WriteLine(comp96 & comp58);

the output would be 96 because now you would be outputting the result of ANDing two chars, which will be an integer.