Additional Reading: The Ternary Operator in Java

The ternary operator(?:) is a conditional statement similar to the if-else statement. The format of using this operator is as follows:

variable x = (expression) ? value if true: value if false

For example:

x=(a>b)?y:z;

Here, if the condition (a>b) is true then:

• x will be assigned the value y.

If the given condition is not true, i.e. a<b, then:

• x will be assigned the value z.

Consider the following snippet of code. It checks whether the value of the variable flag is greater than 0 and assigns a value to the variable “alert” based on that.

if (flag>0){
   alert="ON";
}
else {
   alert="OFF";
}

This code can be written in just one line by using the ternary operator as follows:

alert=(flag>0)?"ON":"OFF";

To read more about this operator, you can go here.