JavaScript Ternary Operator

When writing programs, we often need to make decisions. For example, we may want to display different messages depending on a condition. Normally, we use if...else statements to handle this.

However, JavaScript provides a shorter and cleaner way to write these conditional statements using the ternary operator. The ternary operator is a shorthand way of writing conditional statements in JavaScript. Instead of writing multiple lines using if...else, you can achieve the same result in a single line.

It is called a ternary operator because it takes three operands:

• A condition to evaluate.
• The result if the condition is true.
• The result if the condition is false.

Ternary Operator Syntax

The Ternary operator syntax are as follows:

condition ? expressionIfTrue : expressionIfFalse;

– condition: The expression that will be evaluated.
– expressionIfTrue: The result if the condition evaluates to true.
– expressionIfFalse: The result if the condition evaluates to false.

The Ternary operator starts with conditional expression followed by ? operator. The expression after ? and before : will be executed if the condition is True. If the condition is false the expression after : will be executed.

Example Code

let age = 18;
let message = (age >= 18) ? "You are an adult." : "You are a minor.";
console.log(message);

In the above example:
– The condition is age >= 18.
– If the condition is true, the message will be "You are an adult.".
– If the condition is false, the message will be "You are a minor.".

Since the value of age is 18, the output will be:

You are an adult.