Binary Flags

Question

I'm making some games where the user needs to select/check
several different boxes and leave several others unchecked. I have
put it in a binary "flag" what the correct answer is. That is:
11010
Reading from the rights side of the number, that would be box
1 unchecked, box 2 checked, box 3 unchecked, box 4 checked, and box
5 checked. (There may be more boxes, but they are all unchecked and
leading zeros don't show.)
I've worked out th different bitwise operations to tell me if
they are correct, incorrect, or a mixture. But I'm trying to figure
out how to give feed back at the end. Basically I want to highlight
all the ones that should have been checked and hide all the ones
that should not have been checked, i.e. if there is a zero in the
flag hide the corresponding box and if there is a one put a
highlight color on the box.
How does one quickly read through a binary number and see
which are ones and which are zeros?

Answer 1

Where I do things like this I tend to use a string
representation of the binary flags. This approach is flexible - you
can easily split it to an array - or retrieve it from an array of
individual flags via join("") - I tend to do this- , convert it to
a decimal number (e.g. if you wanted to use the flash binary
operators), or just check the individual flags based on the index
in the string. I used this approach recently to measure
uninterrupted progression from start of a loading queue (i..e.
queue completion without gaps) ... very simple after each character
flag is set, its just indexOf("0") if you set a flag of "1" for a
loaded clip.
E.g.:
var binString = "0110101"
function isChecked(bin, idx) {
return Boolean(bin.substr(idx,1))
trace('decimal for currentbinary representation is
:'+parseInt(binString,2))
trace ('is third checkbox
checked?:'+isChecked(binString,2))