Can you use xor in python?

Some of the implementations suggested here will cause repeated evaluation of the operands in some cases, which may lead to unintended side effects and therefore must be avoided.

That said, a xor implementation that returns either True or False is fairly simple; one that returns one of the operands, if possible, is much trickier, because no consensus exists as to which operand should be the chosen one, especially when there are more than two operands. For instance, should xor(None, -1, [], True) return None, [] or False? I bet each answer appears to some people as the most intuitive one.

For either the True- or the False-result, there are as many as five possible choices: return first operand (if it matches end result in value, else boolean), return first match (if at least one exists, else boolean), return last operand (if ... else ...), return last match (if ... else ...), or always return boolean. Altogether, that's 5 ** 2 = 25 flavors of xor.

def xor(*operands, falsechoice = -2, truechoice = -2):
  """A single-evaluation, multi-operand, full-choice xor implementation
  falsechoice, truechoice: 0 = always bool, +/-1 = first/last operand, +/-2 = first/last match"""
  if not operands:
    raise TypeError('at least one operand expected')
  choices = [falsechoice, truechoice]
  matches = {}
  result = False
  first = True
  value = choice = None
  # avoid using index or slice since operands may be an infinite iterator
  for operand in operands:
    # evaluate each operand once only so as to avoid unintended side effects
    value = bool(operand)
    # the actual xor operation
    result ^= value
    # choice for the current operand, which may or may not match end result
    choice = choices[value]
    # if choice is last match;
    # or last operand and the current operand, in case it is last, matches result;
    # or first operand and the current operand is indeed first;
    # or first match and there hasn't been a match so far
    if choice < -1 or (choice == -1 and value == result) or (choice == 1 and first) or (choice > 1 and value not in matches):
      # store the current operand
      matches[value] = operand
    # next operand will no longer be first
    first = False
  # if choice for result is last operand, but they mismatch
  if (choices[result] == -1) and (result != value):
    return result
  else:
    # return the stored matching operand, if existing, else result as bool
    return matches.get(result, result)

testcases = [
  (-1, None, True, {None: None}, [], 'a'),
  (None, -1, {None: None}, 'a', []),
  (None, -1, True, {None: None}, 'a', []),
  (-1, None, {None: None}, [], 'a')]
choices = {-2: 'last match', -1: 'last operand', 0: 'always bool', 1: 'first operand', 2: 'first match'}
for c in testcases:
  print(c)
  for f in sorted(choices.keys()):
    for t in sorted(choices.keys()):
      x = xor(*c, falsechoice = f, truechoice = t)
      print('f: %d (%s)\tt: %d (%s)\tx: %s' % (f, choices[f], t, choices[t], x))
  print()

In this article, you are going to learn about how to use the XOR operator in Python.

In python, XOR is a bitwise operator. The bitwise operator is also known as the binary operator which is used to perform binary operations between two values or variables.

The symbols that are used to perform an operation is known as operator and the values are known as operand. There are different types of bitwise operators such as bitwise AND, bitwise OR, bitwise NOT, bitwise XOR, and so on. In this article, we will explore the bitwise XOR operator and also see some examples of it.

Bitwise XOR

The bitwise XOR operator which is also known as the exclusive OR This operator mainly compares two binary numbers in the bitwise form. The symbol of this operator is ^ and its main focus point is an integer number. Let’s see an example below where we will use two integer numbers

x = 15
y = 5
 
xor_operation = x ^ y

print(xor_operation)

# Output: 10

Here, we have used XOR operators between two integer numbers We can also use it for the boolean values. Where true is considered as the 1 and false is considered as the 0. Let’s perform a bitwise XOR operation between two booleans in the below section:

xor_operation = True ^ False

print(xor_operation)

# Output: True

Here, you can see that we are getting true as an output. We can also perform bitwise XOR operations by using the operator module.

In python’s built-in operator module there’s a function named xor() and we can get access to this function by using the dot(.) notation and performing bitwise XOR operations. Let’s see the below code example:

import operator

x = 15
y = 5
print(operator.xor(x,y))

# Output: 10

Here, at first, we imported the operator module and used the xor() function that is inside this module. You can see that we are getting exactly the same result which is 10 That means we can also perform a bitwise XOR operation with the help of the operator module.

This is all about how to use the XOR operator in Python. You may perform bitwise XOR operations by following these approaches.

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