The Conditional Operators
The conditional operators ? and : are sometimes called ternary operators since they take three arguments. In fact, they form a kind of foreshortened if-then-else. Their general form is,
expression 1 ? expression 2 : expression 3
What this expression says is: “if expression 1 is true (that is, if its value is non-zero), then the value returned will be expression 2, otherwise the value returned will be expression 3”. Let us understand this with the help of a examples:
int x, y ; scanf ( "%d", &x ) ; y = ( x > 5 ? 3 : 4 ) ;
This statement will store 3 in y if x is greater than 5, otherwise it will store 4 in y.
The equivalent if statement will be,
if ( x > 5 ) y = 3 ; else y = 4 ; char a ; int y ; scanf ( "%c", &a ) ; y = ( a >= 65 && a <= 90 ? 1 : 0 ) ;
Here 1 would be assigned to y if a >=65 && a <=90 evaluates to true, otherwise 0 would be assigned.