The bitwise operator ~ (pronounced as tilde) is a complement operator. It takes one bit operand and returns its complement. If the operand is 1, it returns 0, and if it is 0, it returns 1
For example if a=60 (0011 1100 in binary) its complement is -61 (-0011 1101) stored in 2's complement
>>> a=60 >>> bin(a) '0b111100' >>> b=~a >>> a 60 >>> >>> b -61 >>> bin(b) '-0b111101