Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Using enum to define bit masks

Often you will want to define a list of constants, each representing an integer with one bit turned on. Then, these integers can be bitwise-ORed together and tested for using bitwise-AND, as described above.

The elegant way to do this is to define an enum that uses the left-shift operator to define the values. Here is how the constants for the UIDataDetector are defined:

enum {
    UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber   = 1 << 0,
    UIDataDetectorTypeLink          = 1 << 1,
    UIDataDetectorTypeAddress       = 1 << 2,
    UIDataDetectorTypeCalendarEvent = 1 << 3,
    UIDataDetectorTypeNone          = 0,
    UIDataDetectorTypeAll           = NSUIntegerMax
};