Conditional (ternary) operator

You’ve met if statements. Conditional operators (often referred to as ternay operators work similarly to if-else statements.

What is a ternary operator?

A ternary operator is basically an if-else statement with more concise syntax.

Here’s the basic stucture:

What’s happening

If the condition is true, it will run the trueExpression (between ? and :). If the condition is false, it will run the falseExpression (to the right of :).

Now a concrete example:

Let’s compare ternary and if-else:

The nice thing with ternary operators is that you can assign the result of the statement to a variable in a concise manner.

Downsides

I generally only use ternary operators for very simple conditionals. For anything more complicated I use if-else statements.