Question

For a certain programming project, I need to perform operations on the “bottom two bits” of an int in java set to 0x0000, however I am not sure which end of the int is “bottom” and which is “top”.

Answer 1

The terminology is usually “high order bits” are the most significant (the first ones) and “low order bits” are the least significant (the last ones). Bit positions are referred to by their zero-based position counting from the right, which corresponds with the numerical value of the bit being 2 position

Assuming that “bottom” is synonymous with “low”, that would make the “bottom two bits” the last two bits, or bits in position 1 and 0.

In java, you can get the those bits using a bit mask:

int i; // some integer
int bottomTwoBits = i & 3; // 3 is "11" in binary