C Ternary Operator

C Ternary Operator

Introduction to C Ternary Operator

C ternary operator is also referred as conditional operator or trinary operator because:

• It is only operator that has three operands.
• It is a shorthand of combination of the if-else and return statement.

The syntax of C ternary operator is as follows: 

1	condition ? expression 1 : expression 2

C first evaluates the condition. Based on the return value of the condition the second or third operand is evaluated:

• If the condition is evaluated to true (1), only the second operand (expresion 1) is evaluated. Then the operator return the value of the expression 1.
• If the condtion is evaluated to false (0), only the third operand (expression 2) is evaluated. The value of the expression 2 is returned.

The ternary operator can be rewritten as the if-else and return statement as follows:

1	if(condition)

2	return expression1;

3

else

4	return expression2;

Example of C Ternary Operator

In this example, we are going to write an inline function that uses C ternary operator to find the minimum number between two integers.

#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> /**  * Find min of two integers  * @param x  * @param y  * @return minimum value of x and y  */ inline int min(int x, int y) { return x <= y ? x : y; } int main(int argc, char** argv) {     int x = 10;     int y = 15;     printf("x=%d,y=%d\n", x, y);     printf("min(x,y)=%d\n", min(x, y));     return (0); } x=10,y=15 min(x,y)=10

In this tutorial, you've learned about C ternary operator to make your code shorter and easier to read.

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