Question

This is probably pretty basic, but to save me an hour or so of grief can anyone tell me how you can work out the number of bits required to represent a given positive integer in Java?

e.g. I get a decimal 11, (1011). I need to get the answer, 4.

I figured if I could work out how to set all the bits other than the most significant bit to 0, and then >>> it, I’d get my answer. But… I can’t.

Answer 1

Well, you can just count how many times you shift right before you’re left with just zero:

int value = 11; int count = 0; while (value > 0) {     count++;     value = value >> 1; }