James Elsey

The conditional operator, or ternary operator as it is otherwise known is a great way for assigning variables based on boolean tests. For example you may have seen the following :

public class MonkeySniffer
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {

        int x = 5;
        String s;

        if (x < 10)
        {
            s = "Its less than 10";
        }
        else
        {
            s = "its greater than 10";
        }
        System.out.println(s);
    }
}

Pretty simple right? However that if-else statement is a bit messy considering all we’re doing is checking a condition and then using the output of that to assign a literal to our String reference.