I prototype a lot of my C microcontroller code in Perl, and for that purpose so I, and others might benefit, I wrote Bit::Manip. That contains code that has to be compiled, so for a Pure Perl version, there's Bit::Manip::PP.

It does all the things that we who have to do bitwise operations from time-to-time but not as a profession (or often enough to remember how) we need to do.

Here's an example of turning 'off' a bit:

Code:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Bit::Manip qw(:all);

my $num = 0b11100111; # or literal 231 
my $bit_position = 6;

my $flipped = bit_off($num, $bit_position);

printf("orig:    %b\n", $num);
printf("flipped: %b\n", $flipped);
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Output:

steve@maezi ~/scratch >perl bit.pl
orig:    11100111
flipped: 10100111
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