What does the ^ operator do in Java?

Question

What function does the ^ (caret) operator serve in Java?

When I try this:

int a = 5^n;

...it gives me:

Answer 1

It is XOR operator. It is use to do bit operations on numbers. It has the behavior such that when you do a xor operation on same bits say 0 XOR 0 / 1 XOR 1 the result is 0. But if any of the bits is different then result is 1. So when you did 5^3 then you can look at these numbers 5, 6 in their binary forms and thus the expression becomes (101) XOR (110) which gives the result (011) whose decimal representation is 3.