Bitwise XOR (^) — Description

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). The ^ operator is overloaded for two types of operands: number and BigInt. For numbers, the operator returns a 32-bit integer. For BigInts, the operator returns a BigInt. It first coerces both operands to numeric values and tests the types of them. It performs BigInt XOR if both operands become BigInts; otherwise, it converts both operands to 32-bit integers and performs number bitwise XOR. A {{jsxref("TypeError")}} is thrown if one operand becomes a BigInt but the other becomes a number. The operator operates on the operands' bit representations in two's complement. Each bit in the first operand is paired with the corresponding bit in the second operand: _first bit_ to _first bit_, _second bit_ to _second bit_, and so on. The operator is applied to each pair of bits, and the result is constructed bitwise. The truth table for the XOR operation is Numbers with more than 32 bits get their most significant bits discarded. For example, the following integer with more than 32 bits will be converted to a 32-bit integer > [!WARNING] > You may see people using ^ 0 to truncate numbers to integers. Bitwise XORing any number x with 0 returns x converted to a 32-bit integer, which additionally removes leading bits for numbers outside the range -2147483648 to 2147483647. Use Math.trunc() instead. For BigInts, there's no truncation. Conceptually, understand positive BigInts as having an infinite number of leading 0 bits, and negative BigInts having an infinite number of leading 1 bits. Attribution: Adapted from MDN Web Docs under CC-BY-SA-2.5. Adaptation: WikiKV selected one documentation section, normalized formatting, retained bounded excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.