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I'm trying to convert an incoming sting of 1s and 0s from stdin into their respective binary values (where a string such as "11110111" would be converted to 0xF7). This seems pretty trivial but I don't want to reinvent the wheel so I'm wondering if there's anything in the C/C++ standard libs that can already perform such an operation?

You can use std::bitset (if then length of your bits is known at compile time)
Though with some program you could break it up into chunks and combine.

#include <bitset>
#include <iostream>
int main()
    std::bitset<5>  x(std::string("01011"));
    std::cout << x << ":" << x.to_ulong() << std::endl;
using namespace std;
string getBinaryString(int value, unsigned int length, bool reverse) {
    string output = string(length, '0');
    if (!reverse) {
        for (unsigned int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            if ((value & (1 << i)) != 0) {
                output[i] = '1';
    else {
        for (unsigned int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            if ((value & (1 << (length - i - 1))) != 0) {
                output[i] = '1';
    return output;
unsigned long getInteger(const string& input, size_t lsbindex, size_t msbindex) {
    unsigned long val = 0;
    unsigned int offset = 0;
    if (lsbindex > msbindex) {
        size_t length = lsbindex - msbindex;
        for (size_t i = msbindex; i <= lsbindex; i++, offset++) {
            if (input[i] == '1') {
                val |= (1 << (length - offset));
    else { //lsbindex < msbindex
        for (size_t i = lsbindex; i <= msbindex; i++, offset++) {
            if (input[i] == '1') {
                val |= (1 << offset);
    return val;
int main() {
    int value = 23;
    cout << value << ": " << getBinaryString(value, 5, false) << endl;
    string str = "01011";
    cout << str << ": " << getInteger(str, 1, 3) << endl;
        
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