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Ternary Operator |
Ternary Operator
Programmers use ternary operators in C for decision making inplace of conditional statements if and else. The ternary operator is an operator that takes three arguments. The first argument is a comparison argument, the second is the result upon a true comparison, and the third is the result upon a false comparison. If it helps you can think of the operator as shortened way of writing an if-else statement.
Here's a simple decision-making example using if and else:
int a = 10, b = 20, c;
if (a < b) {
c = a;
}
else {
c = b;
}
printf("%d", c);
This example takes more than 10 lines, but that isn't necessary. You can write the above program in just 3 lines of code using the ternary operator.
Syntax
condition ? value_if_true : value_if_false
The statement evalutes to statement_1 if the condition is true, and statement_2 otherwise.
Here's the above example re-written to use the ternary operator:
int a = 10, b = 20, c;
c = (a < b) ? a : b;
printf("%d", c);
Output of the example should be:
10
c
is set equal to a
, because the condition a<b
was true.
This looks pretty simple, right? Do note that value_if_true
and value_if_false
must have the same type, and they cannot be full statements but simply expressions.
The ternary operator can be nested too same like nested if-else statements. Consider this nested if-else statement :
int a = 1, b = 2, ans;
if (a == 1) {
if (b == 2) {
ans = 3;
} else {
ans = 5;
}
} else {
ans = 0;
}
printf ("%d\n", ans);
Here's the above code re-written using nested ternary operator:
int a = 1, b = 2, ans;
ans = (a == 1 ? (b == 2 ? 3 : 5) : 0);
printf ("%d\n", ans);
The output of both of the above codes should be:
3