title: masking out unwanted bits in c
body: <p>Given the decimal <code>71744474</code> in binary it is <code>0100010001101011101111011010</code> what I am trying to extract from this decimal is every seven bits starting from the lower bits. Each of the seven bits are to represent a printable ASCII character which can only have 7 bits. In total I am pulling out four characters. The first character is <code>1011010</code> which is <code>Z</code> in ASCII. The next character is <code>w</code> and so on. I am thinking there is a way to mask out the bits I care about some how.</p>