Question

What is the meaning of the following expression in c++?

(variable1 | (variable2 << 8))

What is the meaning of it? And what does it represent?

Answer 1

It concatenates the two variables.
Suppose you have two chars, a and b. a|b<<8 shifts the b 8 bits to the left, | sets every bit that is in a or b.
So in this example the result would be “ab“.

‘a’ is 97, ‘b’ is 98, so bitwise the following happens:

a:      01100001
b:              01100010
b<<8:   0110001000000000
a|b<<8: 0110001001100001