Ternary Operator - PHP - P27

The ternary operator is a way to quickly express if/else statements. The ternary operator follows the following syntax:

( boolean expression ) ? if_true : if_false;

If the boolean expression evaluates to true, the “if_true” result is displayed, otherwise the “if_false” result is displayed.

Just as a quick recap, the normal if/else syntax looks like the following:

$expression = true;

if ( $expression ) {
// do statement if true
} else {
// do statement if false
}

This gets redundant especially when you’re just echoing statements. You will need to write 2 different echo statements: one for the if true portion and the other for the if false portion. The ternary operator can be squeezed into a single echo statement itself.

echo ( boolean expression ) ? if_true : if_false;

Let’s look at an example.

$money = 2000;
echo ( $money == 2000 ) ? "Time to spend" : "Need more money";

Since the variable $money contains 2000, the expression $money ≥ 2000 evaluates to true, so “Time to spend” is displayed on the screen. If the value that was stored inside of the $money variable was less than 2000, you would see “Need more money” on your screen.

Ternary operators are also great when you need to assign values to a variable after some decision is made.

$money = 2000;
$isBuyingAMountainBike = ( $money == 2000 ) ? true : false;

In the statement above, PHP:
- Assigns 2000 to the $money variable.
- Progresses to the $isBuyingAMountainBike variable. It sees that it contains a ternary operator.
- PHP evaluates the expression, $money == 2000. The expression returns true.
- Since the expression returned true, PHP goes into the “if_true” portion of the ternary expression and sees that it contains the value true.
- The value true is assigned to the $isBuyingAMountainBike variable.

We could have easily placed Yes/No or 1/0 values instead of true/false for the ternary expression above.

The ternary operator should not be abused; it should only be used in simple if/else decision making. It you have nested expressions, you should try to either convert the nested boolean expression into a single expression with the help of logical operators, like the && operator, or simply use the if/else structure.

Read the full article on my website
https://www.dinocajic.com/php-ternary-operator/

Code for this tutorial
https://github.com/dinocajic/php-7-youtube-tutorials/blob/master/27%20Ternary%20Operator.php

Full Code
https://github.com/dinocajic/php-7-youtube-tutorials

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--
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