Trouble with ternary tester

Anonymous User 1923 28 Apr 2015

Could someone please help me make sense of this ternary operator. I checked the web and couldn't find any examples to clear it up for me. All the examples I saw included only one boolean expression followed by expression1 : expression 2.

int x = 5;

System.out.println(x > 2 ? x < 4 ? 10 : 8 :7);

}}

It looks like it is ( booleanExpression ? booleanExpression ? not sure here : expression1 : expression2 )

Ask by Anonymous User

Updated 28 Apr 2015

1 Answers

Anonymous User 28 Apr 2015 Accepted Answer

the ternary syntax is:

booleanExpression ? value if true : value if false;

which is shorthand for an if statement

if (booleanExpression){
  value = valueIfTrue;
} else {
  value = valueIfFalse;
}

In this example it looks like their "value if true" expression is itself a ternary expression.

I'll add some brackets to make it obvious how it is evaluating:

x > 2 ?  (x < 4 ? 10 : 8) :7

i.e. the equivalent of a nested if/else statement

int answer;
if (x > 2){
  if (x<4) {
    answer = 10;
  } else {
    answer = 8;
  }
} else {
  answer = 7;
}

Of course if I ever saw anybody actually WRITING code like this, I would probably (not so) politely suggest that they rewrite their code to make it more readable

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Trouble with ternary tester

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