freeCodeCamp/guide/english/c/ternary-operator/index.md

title
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