The ternary operator is a one-line if
statement.
Very handy for simple conditions.
This is how it looks:
<expression> if <condition> else <expression>
Consider the following Python code:
a = 25
b = 50
x = 0
y = 1
result = x if a > b else y
print(result)
1
Here we use four variables, a
and b
are for the condition, while x
and y
represent the expressions.
a
and b
are the values we are checking against each other to evaluate some condition, in this case, we are checking if a
is greater than b
.
If the expression holds true, i.e., a
is greater than b
then the value o x
will be attributed to result
which will be equals to 0.
However, if a
is less than b
, then we have the value of y
assigned to result
, and result
will hold the value 1
.
Since a
is less than b
, 25 < 50, result
will have 1
as final value from y
.
The easy way to remember how the condition is evaluated is to read it in plain English.
Our example would read: result
will be x
if a
is greater than b
otherwise y
.