# Bitwise trick to convert Float to Int

I recently found myself using this trick a lot when playing with LeetCode problems: Use double NOT ~~ operator to quick convert a float into an int, instead of using Math.floor or something similar.

        ~~(5.423451) == 5 // true
Math.floor(5.423451) == 5 // true


Bitwise operators tend to be fast, so you can use this trick to optimize your code sometimes.

But why does this work?

JavaScript numbers have 64-bit precision, which is also called double precision, the internal representation is based on the IEEE 754 standard 1:

In most JavaScript engines, if a number $$x$$ is small enough integer (e.g: $$-2^{31} \le x \le 2^{31}$$), it will be represented as a 32-bit integer 2. And will be convert back to 64-bit when it large enough.

According to ECMAScript Specs 3, when you perform any bitwise operator, the values will be converted to 32-bit integer 4 , 5.

For converting numbers, we can perform some "useless" bitwise operators, such as:

~~(5.423451) == 5 // Double not
5.423451 | 0 == 5 // Or
5.423451 << 0 == 5 // Right shift
5.423451 >> 0 == 5 // Left shift


Let's apply this trick to solve this simple LeetCode problem (#342): Check if a number is power of 4.

If there is a number $$x$$ such that $$x^4 = n$$, with $$n \in Z$$ is an integer, so $$x$$ must be an integer ($$x \in Z$$) as well. In other way, the logarithm base 4 of $$n$$ should be an integer $$log_4n \in Z$$).

So we can solve the problem by checking if logarithm base 4 of $$n$$ is an integer or not. But it's a bit tricky, because JavaScript's Math.log function is only for base 10.

It's time for a little high school math, we know that the logarithm $$log_bx$$ can be computed from the logarithms of $$x$$ and $$b$$ with respect to arbitary base $$k$$, using the following formula 6:

$log_ab = \displaystyle{\frac{log_{10}b}{log_{10}a}}$

To check if a number is integer or not, we can check if that number is still the same after we convert it into an integer, so our final implementation should be:

var isPowerOfFour = function(num) {
let lg4 = Math.log(num) / Math.log(4);
return lg4 === (~~lg4);
};


## Footnotes:

1

The Internal Representation of Numbers, Speaking JavaScript, Chapter 11

2

Integers in JavaScript, Speaking JavaScript, Chaper 11

3

Bitwise NOT Operator, ECMAScript 2017 Language Specification

5

32-bit Integers via Bitwise Operators, Speaking JavaScript, Chapter 11

Created: 2019-04-22 Mon 14:41