Comments on: Random Perl Snippet

By: Kevin Pendleton

Kevin Pendleton — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:42:29 +0000

I did eventually find it in my “Perl 5 Developer’s Guide” called “The Conditional Operator”, which is poorly named since there are multiple conditional operators in Perl. I did find instances on the web where it is called the tertiary operator in Perl as well. Anyway, I also learned that it can also handle an “elsif” scenario like this:

$value = ($condition1) ? $value1 : ($condition2) ? $value2 : $value3;

Kevin

By: Brandon Checketts

Brandon Checketts — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:22:55 +0000

That is called a ‘Tertiary’ operator, and is basically an operator that takes three arguments. Think of it as a condensed if..then..else statement. (condition) ? (true) : (false)

I use them all the time in PHP to shorten simple conditionals from five lines to one.

if (condition) { $value = something } else { $value = something else }

Versus

$value = (condition) ? 'something' : 'something else';