Question

I’m trying to draw a line, broken out into segments dependent on values. For example, if there are 5 fields, and all 5 fields were true, then my Line would look like

-----

If say the first and last fields were true, and everything else would be false, then it would be

-   -

I thought I could do this with a bit mask of some sort. First of all, I’ve never done a bit mask before, but I think I’ve seen them here and there. I was wondering how I could go about this, and use enumerations instead of 1/0 for readability. As far as I can see from my data, I would only need values of either 1 or 0 for the different properties. However, it would be good to know how to have one of the values be a three level or higher enumeration for future reference. Thanks!

Trying to do something like:

enum CodingRegions {
    Coding = 0x01,
    NonCoding = 0x02
};

enum Substitution {
    Synonymous = 0x04,
    NonSynonmous = 0x05
};

Then based on the value of the object, I could do

bitmask???? = object.CodingRegion | object.Substitution;

Then later, check the value of the bitmask somehow, and then draw the line accordingly based on what the values are.

Answer 1

Not sure this is what you want, but:

// assumed Coding/NonCoding, Synonomous/NonSynonymous are opposites of each other. If not, add more bit fields

enum CodingRegions 
{
    Coding = 1 << 0
} ;

enum Substitution
{
    Synonymous = 1 << 1
}

void PrintBitmask( NSUInteger bitmask )
{
    printf( "%s", bitmask & Coding != 0 ? "-" : " " ) ;
    printf( "%s", bitmask & Substitution != 0 ? "-" : " " ) ;

    printf( "\n" ) ;
}

Your PrintBitmask() could also look like this:

void PrintBitmask( NSUInteger bitmask )
{
    printf( "%s", bitmask & Coding != 0 ? "Coding" : "Noncoding" ) ;
    printf( "|" ) ;
    printf( "%s", bitmask & Substitution != 0 ? "Synonymous-" : "Nonsynonymous" ) ;

    printf( "\n" ) ;
}