Ternary Operator

 

Ahoy everyone.
This time i’ll show you guys how to use the ternay operator given by many languages like C or PAWN.
This time we will only talk about the condititonal operator to replace if-statements. There are also ways to perform other actions using nested ternary operator statements.

It is commonly referred as the conditional operator, inline if (iif), or ternary if. An expression x ? y : a evaluates to y if the value of x is true, and otherwise to a.

Brief example, comparing 2 numbers using if-statement.

 

[pastacode lang=”c” manual=”new%20result%3B%0Anew%20a%3D1%3B%0Anew%20b%3D0%3B%0A%0Aif%20(a%20%3E%20b)%0A%7B%0Aresult%20%3D%20x%3B%0A%7D%0Aelse%0A%7B%0Aresult%20%3D%20y%3B%0A%7D” message=”” highlight=”5″ provider=”manual”/]

 

Using our beloved ternary operator makes it much simplier and shorter, and that’s it.

 

[pastacode lang=”c” manual=”result%20%3D%20a%20%3E%20b%20%3F%20x%20%3A%20y%3B%0Aresult%20%3D%20a%20%3C%20b%20%3F%20printf(%22a%20is%20less%22)%20%3A%20printf(%22a%20is%20greater%22)%3B” message=”” highlight=”1,2″ provider=”manual”/]

 

Now some examples from my gamemodes, in this case my spectate system to spectate a random player.
Using if-statement.

[pastacode lang=”c” manual=”if(!tmp)%20return%20INVALID_PLAYER_ID%3B%0Aif(idx%3Etmp)%20idx%3D0%3B%0Aif(idx%3C0)%20idx%3Dtmp-1%3B%0Areturn%20randoms%5Bidx%5D%3B” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

 

Now again to shorten this we’ll use ternary operator again.

 

[pastacode lang=”c” manual=”return%20(!tmp)%20%3F%20INVALID_PLAYER_ID%20%3A%20randoms%5B(idx%3Etmp)%3F0%3A((idx%3C0)%3F(tmp-1)%3Aidx)%5D%3B” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

 

So in conclusion we figured out we can economize letters using ternary operators instead of if-statement in some cases.

For now that’s it, but during the next days i’ll introduce some more advanced examples using the ternary operator in PAWN.