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[QUOTE="Moerderin, post: 574689"]
In terms of reading and storing, binary information is managed by bytes.

Thank you Frank, and everyone else. You are helping me understand this
a great deal.  first of all I feel like an idiot, after looking at
other posts and so forth I realize I am supposed to label my bits like
this :

| 15| 14| 13| 12| 11| 10| 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |

Well, with all of your guys' help that you gave me I tried writing
code to do pretty much exactly what I need, but the mask isn't
working.  here is the exact situation of what I have:

| 15| 14| 13| 12| 11| 10| 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|                          Word Count                           |
word 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|  0  |   1 |          Message_ID           |      unused       |
word 2
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|                       stuff I don't care about here           |
word 3
-----------------------------------------------------------------|
more stuff I don't care about here           |  word 4
-----------------------------------------------------------------

My goal in writing this code was to extract the Message_ID and put it
in its own file.  to do that I wrote code to skip the first word
(which is two bytes) and read the second word after shifting the
Message_ID to the far right (at least thats what I thought the coding
would do :) Again, thank you for all your guys' help

well here is the short java file that I wrote, its not long so please
look at it and tell me why it wont mask and shift the Message_ID and
write it into a new file

import java.io.*;

public class Mask {
public static void main(String[] arguments) {
try {
// create object to be read
File bits = new File("c:/test.txt");
FileInputStream file = new FileInputStream(bits);

//skip the first two bytes
file.skip(2);

//read the next two bytes
byte[] ary = new byte[2];

//read file that contains bits
file.read(ary);

//create a mask
int i = 0;
int messageIDBits = (i >> 6) & 0xFF;

//create object to write the bits which were read
File txt = new File("c:/test1.txt");
FileOutputStream messageID = new FileOutputStream(txt);

//write the bits containing the Message_ID
messageID.write(ary);

//close the files
file.close();
messageID.close();

} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error -- " + e.toString());
}

}

}
[/QUOTE]

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