How to use the XOR operator in Python

John on April 07, 2021

XOR (exclusive or) is a bitwise operator that compares the binary representation of two numbers.

In Python, the XOR operator is a ^ (caret). Let's compare two integers to see how it works.

output = 6 ^ 4
print(output)

2

In the above example, Python is comparing 110 to 100 (the binary representations of 6 and 4) and returning the result.

If two boolean values are supplied to XOR, a boolean result will be returned:

output = True ^ False

print(output)

True