How to convert a decimal number to binary in Swift?

Since none of the solutions contemplate negative numbers, I came up with a simple solution that basically reads the number's internal representation and pads it automatically to the width of its type. This should work on all BinaryInteger types.

extension BinaryInteger {
    var binaryDescription: String {
        var binaryString = ""
        var internalNumber = self
        for _ in (1...self.bitWidth) {
            binaryString.insert(contentsOf: "\(internalNumber & 1)", at: binaryString.startIndex)
            internalNumber >>= 1
        }
        return "0b" + binaryString
    }
}

Examples:

UInt8(22).binaryDescription     // "0b00010110"
Int8(60).binaryDescription      // "0b00111100"
Int8(-60).binaryDescription     // "0b11000100"
Int16(255).binaryDescription    // "0b0000000011111111"
Int16(-255).binaryDescription   // "0b1111111100000001"

Swift 5.1 / Xcode 11

Thanks Gustavo Seidler. My version of his solution is complemented by spaces for readability.

extension BinaryInteger {
    var binaryDescription: String {
        var binaryString = ""
        var internalNumber = self
        var counter = 0

        for _ in (1...self.bitWidth) {
            binaryString.insert(contentsOf: "\(internalNumber & 1)", at: binaryString.startIndex)
            internalNumber >>= 1
            counter += 1
            if counter % 4 == 0 {
                binaryString.insert(contentsOf: " ", at: binaryString.startIndex)
            }
        }

        return binaryString
    }
}

Examples:

UInt8(9).binaryDescription      // "0000 1001"
Int8(5).binaryDescription       // "0000 0101"
UInt16(1945).binaryDescription  // "0000 0111 1001 1001"

Int16(14).binaryDescription     // "0000 0000 0000 1110"
Int32(6).binaryDescription      // "0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0110"
UInt32(2018).binaryDescription  // "0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0111 1110 0010"

You can convert the decimal value to a human-readable binary representation using the String initializer that takes a radix parameter:

let num = 22
let str = String(num, radix: 2)
print(str) // prints "10110"

If you wanted to, you could also pad it with any number of zeroes pretty easily as well:

Swift 5

func pad(string : String, toSize: Int) -> String {
  var padded = string
  for _ in 0..<(toSize - string.count) {
    padded = "0" + padded
  }
    return padded
}

let num = 22
let str = String(num, radix: 2)
print(str) // 10110
pad(string: str, toSize: 8)  // 00010110