Re: ternary operator ?

It's essentially like a returning inline if statement. The first expression is the test, and if it's true it will execute the expression after the question mark, if it's false, it will execute the expression after the colon e.g

my $foo = "test";
print +( $foo =~ /^\w+\z/ ? "condition true" : "condition false" ),$/;

my $bar = defined $x ? $x : "nought";
print "\$bar is: $bar", $/;

__output__

condition true
$bar is: nought
[download]

See the Conditional Operator section in the perlop manpage for more details.
HTH

_________ broquaint

Comment on Re: ternary operator ? Download Code

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Re: ternary operator ? by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Nov 29, 2002 at 10:37 UTC
I wouldn't say "execute", but rather "return". Why? Because it can also return lvalues. In ALGOL, one could do: `IF a THEN b ELSE c FI := IF d THEN e ELSE f FI;` [download] which was great. You can do something like that in Perl using the ternary operator: `($a ? $b : $c) = ($d ? $e : $f);` [download] You can't do that in C or Java without use much more code. Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: ternary operator ? by broquaint (Abbot) on Nov 29, 2002 at 10:42 UTC
I wouldn't say "execute", but rather "return". So would I ;) It's essentially like a returning inline if statement. `_________ broquaint`	[reply]