Question

I have a class that is parsing an object to be sent to a another hardware device. The class contains a bunch of features that are either enabled or disabled (bools). However, we only write words to data to the piece of hardware (essentially a uint, or 16-bit integer).

Therefore, I need to translate

Feature1 (bool, true)
Feature2 (bool, false)
Feature3 (bool, false)
Feature4 (bool, false)
...
Feature16 (bool, false)

and parse it into a single word:

000000000001

The device sees a word as little-endian, fyi.

I was trying to bitwise-or against a uint, but the fact that the flags are bools makes this messy so I was wondering if anyone else had any slick suggestions 😉

EDIT: No sooner than I post this, I relaxed and thought of this solution…

private static ushort BooleanToUint(List<bool> bools)
        {
            ushort word = 0;
            for(int i = 0; i < bools.Count; i++)
            {
                if(bools[i])
                {
                    int twoToPower = (1 << i);
                    word = (ushort) (word + twoToPower);
                }
            }

            return word;
        }

Answer 1

If you have your boolean values in an array you can just use to index to set the corresponding bit (if set):

bool[] boolValues = Enumerable.Repeat(true, 16).ToArray(); //test
uint intValue = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < boolValues.Length; i++)
{
    if (boolValues[i])
        intValue += (uint)(1 << i);
}