Questions tagged [conditional-operator]

The conditional operator is a ternary-operator that is part of the syntax for a basic conditional expression in several programming languages. It is also commonly referred to as inline if.

The basic format of the conditional operator is this:

condition ? first_expression : second_expression;

A number of languages have a ternary operator consisting of ? and :. "Conditional operator" is the proper name for this operator, at least in C and C-like languages.

Syntax examples:

MySQL

This is MySQL specific and not SQL standard:

IF(condition,value_when_true,value_when_false);

C / C++ / C# / Java / PHP

(condition) ? value_when_true : value_when_false ;

Python

value_when_true if condition else value_when_false

VB / VBA

IIF(condition, value_when_true, value_when_false)

The conditional operator is not the only ternary operator, so don't use that name for this operator. Any operator that takes 3 inputs (operands) is a ternary operator, like the SQL BETWEEN operator and the Python extended slice syntax.