What is the Conditional Operator?

The Conditional Operator is sometimes called the Ternary Operator or "question mark" operator. It is an operator that allows us to write the if ... else statement in a short and concise way. The operator is used with a question mark ? hence the name "question mark" operator. The operator has three operands hence the name "ternary" operator.

Syntax and Example

Normally, you would write an if ... else statement the following way:

let value;

if (condition) {
  value = "true";
} else {
  value = "false";
}

With the Conditional operator, you can write the above code the following way:

// syntax -> condition ? operand2: operand3; 
let value = condition ? "true" : "false";

The first operand is the condition you want to evaluate, followed by a question mark (?). The second operand is the expression you wish to execute if the condition is "truthy", followed by a colon (:). And lastly, the third operand is the expression to execute if the condition is "falsy".

You can see that with the Conditional operator, you can neatly write an if ... else statement block into one line and assign it directly to a variable.

Nesting/Chaining

The Conditional operator is often used as an alternative to if ... else statement block because it is shorter to write, sometimes it is still better for code readability to use if ... else statements. That being said, you can use Conditional operator for if ... else if ... else statements as well.

For example:

function getAgeGroup(age) {
  if (age >= 18) {
    return "adult";
  } 
  else if (age >= 13) {
    return "adolescent";
  }
  else {
    return "child";
  }
}

Here we have a function that return the age terminology based on the parameter "age", the function evaluate the input argument with if ... else if ... else statement and return appropriate term.
If we wanted to use the Ternary Operator, we could do it like so:

function getAgeGroup(age) {
  return age >= 18 ? "adult" 
    : age >= 13 ? "adolescent" 
    : "child";
}

You can see that it much shorter, as for whether it is as readable, I will let you be the judge of that 😃.

(Explanation: In the example, if the first condition is "truthy" it will return the string "adult", otherwise, it will move to the second condition and again check for "truthy" and return the string "adolescent". If the second condition is "falsy" then the string "child" will be returned.)

Summary

The Conditional Operator has three operands and can be used as an alternative to if ... else statement block. It can be difficult to read so it should be used for simple cases. An example of my use case would be in React, where you can't use if condition directly inside the JSX so you could use this conditional operator for conditional rendering.

Thank you for reading, please leave a comment if you found it helpful, or feedback if you found a mistake or would like to add to it.