Conditional or ternary operator in C

Conditional or ternary (?:) operator in C

By Ahmad Irshad | C Programming Tutorial > Conditional or ternary operaotr in C

The ternary operator (?:) is also known as conditional operator. It is a replacement of if..else statements. Which is used to evaluate an expression based on condition in place of longer if...else conditional statements.

Syntax for ternary operator:

1. <conditional-expression> ? <true-expression> : <false-expression>

1) The ternary operator takes three arguments as you can see above.

2) Syntax of ternary operator is always be like <conditional-expression> followed by ? symbol then <true-expression> followed by :

symbol and then at last <false-expression>

3) If the condition is true then <true-expression> is executed else <false-expression> is executed. Let's have a look at the below example to uderstand it better way.

Example 1: Ternary operator (?:)

1. #include <stdio.h> int main() { int age; printf("Please enter your age here:\n"); scanf("%d", &age); /* * If condition is true then will be print " You are adult." * else will be print " You are not adult." */ (age >= 18) ? printf("You are adult") : printf("You are not adult"); return 0; }

Output:

1. Please enter your age here: 15
2. You are not adult

In the above program prints You are not adult.Since the condition (age >= 18) is false therefore, <false-expression> gets executed.

Example 2: Ternary operator (?:)

1. #include <stdio.h> int main() { int num1, num2, max;
2. printf("Please enter any two numbers");
3. scanf("%d%d", &num1, &num2); /* * If (num > num2) then * assign num1 to max * else * assign num2 to max */ max = (num1 > num2) ? num1 : num2;
4. printf("Maximum is %d.", max); return 0; }

Output:

1. Please enter any two numbers : 10, 20
2. Maximum is 20

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