How does !!~ (not not tilde/bang bang tilde) alter the result of a 'contains/included' Array method call?

Question

If you read the comments at the jQuery inArray page here, there's an interesting declaration:

!!~jQuery.inArray(elm, arr) 

Now, I believe a double-exclamation point will convert the result to type boolean, with the value of true. What I don't understand is what is the use of the tilde (~) operator in all of this?

var arr = ["one", "two", "three"];
if (jQuery.inArray("one", arr) > -1) { alert("Found"); }

Refactoring the if statement:

if (!!~jQuery.inArray("one", arr)) { alert("Found"); }

Breakdown:

jQuery.inArray("one", arr)     // 0
~jQuery.inArray("one", arr)    // -1 (why?)
!~jQuery.inArray("one", arr)   // false
!!~jQuery.inArray("one", arr)  // true

I also noticed that if I put the tilde in front, the result is -2.

~!!~jQuery.inArray("one", arr) // -2

I don't understand the purpose of the tilde here. Can someone please explain it or point me towards a resource?

Answer 1

There's a specfic reason you'll sometimes see ~ applied in front of $.inArray.

Basically,

~$.inArray("foo", bar)

is a shorter way to do

$.inArray("foo", bar) !== -1

$.inArray returns the index of the item in the array if the first argument is found, and it returns -1 if its not found. This means that if you're looking for a boolean of "is this value in the array?", you can't do a boolean comparison, since -1 is a truthy value, and when $.inArray returns 0 (a falsy value), it means its actually found in the first element of the array.

Applying the ~ bitwise operator causes -1 to become 0, and causes 0 to become `-1. Thus, not finding the value in the array and applying the bitwise NOT results in a falsy value (0), and all other values will return non-0 numbers, and will represent a truthy result.

if (~$.inArray("foo", ["foo",2,3])) {
    // Will run
}

And it'll work as intended.

Answer 2

!!~expr evaluates to false when expr is -1 otherwise true.
It is same as expr != -1, only broken*

---

It works because JavaScript bitwise operations convert the operands to 32-bit signed integers in two's complement format. Thus !!~-1 is evaluated as follows:

   -1 = 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111b // two's complement representation of -1
  ~-1 = 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000b // ~ is bitwise not (invert all bits)
   !0 = true                                     // ! is logical not (true for falsy)
!true = false                                    // duh

A value other than -1 will have at least one bit set to zero; inverting it will create a truthy value; applying ! operator twice to a truthy value returns boolean true.

When used with .indexOf() and we only want to check if result is -1 or not:

!!~"abc".indexOf("d") // indexOf() returns -1, the expression evaluates to false
!!~"abc".indexOf("a") // indexOf() returns  0, the expression evaluates to true
!!~"abc".indexOf("b") // indexOf() returns  1, the expression evaluates to true

---

* !!~8589934591 evaluates to false so this abomination cannot be reliably used to test for -1.

Answer 3

The tilde operator isn't actually part of jQuery at all - it's a bitwise NOT operator in JavaScript itself.

See The Great Mystery of the Tilde(~).

You are getting strange numbers in your experiments because you are performing a bitwise logical operation on an integer (which, for all I know, may be stored as two's complement or something like that...)

Two's complement explains how to represent a number in binary. I think I was right.