A couple of days ago a friend of mine was asking about how to do bitwise math on Salesforce in Apex. I didn’t know how to do it on the platform so I decided to give it a shot.

NOTE: None of the topics covered here are specific to Apex or the Salesforce platform. These concepts extend to most languages. However, the code examples below have been tested and verified on the Salesforce platform.

What are bitwise operations?

Bitwise operations are operations that deal with numbers on a binary level. You see this type of operation mainly in lower level programing languages where you have limited resources and need to store lots of information in a small amount of space. For these examples we’ll be using the match details from DOTA 2 output. This allows for Valve to return a single number to represent lot of information.