When working with binary data, it is often useful to calculate the Hamming distance between two bitsets. The Hamming distance measures the number of positions at which the corresponding bits between two bitsets are different. In this blog post, we will explore how to find the Hamming distance between two C++ bitset objects.

Initializing Bitsets

First, let’s start by initializing two bitset objects. We will assume that both bitsets have the same size.

#include <iostream>
#include <bitset>

int main() {
    std::bitset<8> a("10101010");
    std::bitset<8> b("11110000");

    std::cout << "Bitset a: " << a << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Bitset b: " << b << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

In this example, we have initialized two bitset objects, a and b, with binary strings “10101010” and “11110000” respectively. The size of both bitsets has been set to 8 using template argument <8>. We print the values of both bitsets for verification purposes.

Calculating the Hamming Distance

To calculate the Hamming distance between two bitsets, we can use the bit-wise XOR operator (^) to find the positions where the bits differ. Then, by counting the number of set bits in the result, we can determine the Hamming distance.

Here’s the code to calculate the Hamming distance:

int hammingDistance(std::bitset<8> a, std::bitset<8> b) {
    std::bitset<8> diff = a ^ b;
    int distance = diff.count();
    return distance;
}

int main() {
    std::bitset<8> a("10101010");
    std::bitset<8> b("11110000");

    int distance = hammingDistance(a, b);
    std::cout << "Hamming Distance: " << distance << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

In this code, we define a function hammingDistance that takes two bitset objects as input. We calculate the difference between the two bitsets using the XOR operator (^) and store the result in the diff variable. We then use the count function to count the number of set bits in the diff bitset and return the count as the Hamming distance.

Finally, we call the hammingDistance function with a and b and print the resulting Hamming distance.

Conclusion

Calculating the Hamming distance between two C++ bitset objects is a straightforward process using the bit-wise XOR operator and the count function. This can be useful in various scenarios where you need to measure the difference between binary data.

#bitsets #C++