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Bit Masks

It's difficult to find an app that doesn't rely on some form of conditional logic to implement its functionality. This is almost always performed using statements like:

if (processAccount === true) {
  /* do something */
}

If and switch statements work well for a limited number of conditionals, but what if your app had 10's or 100's of conditionals to evaluate? Luckily, there's another way.

The goal of the Bit Masks app is demonstrate how to use bit masks to evaluate longer sequences of switches without having to rely on long strings of conditional statements.

User Stories​

  • User can see a vertical list of checkboxes with the following cities and their timezones:
    - Moscow: GMT +3
    - Paris: GMT +2
    - Berlin: GMT +2
    - Brussels: GMT +2
    - Amsterdam: GMT +2
    - Rome: GMT +2
    - London: GMT +1
    - Dublin: GMT +1
    - New York: GMT -4
    - Washington, DC: GMT -4
    - St. Louis: GMT -5
    - Los Angeles: GMT -7
    - Tokyo: GMT +9
    - Beijing: GMT +8
    - Ho Chi Minh City: GMT +7
    - Mumbai: GMT +5
  • User can see a GMT search box where an integer representing a GMT offset can be entered into and a 'Find Cities' button.
  • User can click the 'Find Cities' button to display the names of the cities in that GMT offset in an output area.

Developer Notes​

For this exercise the developer should use sequences of 24 binary bits, each corresponding a GMT time zone from +12 to -12 to map cities to their timezones.

Searches should be conducted by combining a bit mask for the desired time zone against the city-specific bit sequences to identify matches. Determining if a city meets the search criteria shouldn't rely on a statement such as

if (city[i].gmtOffset === searchOffset) {
  /* Found it! */
}

It should instead rely on a bitwise operation.

Bonus features​

  • User can search for cities NOT in the GMT offset entered in the search box.
  • User can see a summary count of the number of cities that met the search criteria.

Example projects​

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