PHP Tutorial (& MySQL) #34 - Ternary Operators

Key Takeaways

all right then my friends so now we've pretty much finished the actual project what I've done is gone ahead and created this sandbox. PHP page already so a lot of the stuff going forward is going to be in this sandbox. PHP page but we might dip into these other files now and again as well so anyway turnery operators what are they well they're basically like an alternative to using an if statement but it's much more concise the way we write it Neer and that's not to say you should always use Turner operators over if statements there are a time and a place to use them and sometimes an if statement might work better but let's look at an example so first of all I'm going to create a variable just to keep track of some kind of value and we'll call this score and set it equal to 50 to begin with now if we were to do an if check to see if the score was over a certain value it would look something like this if score is over 40 then we're going to do something we'll Echo high schore and if it's not we'll do an else statement and we'll just Echo low score okay so that's our little if statement right here we're doing two things aren't we based on this evaluation if it's true we're doing this if it's false we're doing this so let me just run this just to show you it works you know it will do anyway but let's go to sandbox. PHP and we can see see high score if we change this to like 20 it should be a low score which it is so there are the two different outcomes right now A tary operator is similar in that we can have two different outcomes based on a certain condition but instead of taking out four or five lines it's going to take it one line so let me take this back to 50 to begin with and let's do this turny operator so the way a turnery operator looks is that first of all we have our condition so score is great than 40 so this bit is what we're evaluating and that was in the if statement right there so that comes first then we have a question mark so it's like asking a question is the score over 40 question mark and then we have two values we have a value if this is true and that is going to be high score and that was what we echoed out right here and then we have a colon and then after that we have the second value and that is the value if this is false so it's going to be low score like that and that's it okay so we're evaluating this if it's true then we get this value if it's false we get this value so it's pretty much the same as this now we don't Echo things out here right this turny operator it returns a value so what we could say is Val is equal to this okay and then we could Echo Val because whatever is returned here is going to be either this or this and either this or this will be stored in this variable dependent on this condition so if it's true then Val is going to equal to this if this is false then Val will be equal to this so let's see if this works I'm going to save it and currently we should get high school so refresh High schore Works change this to 20 and we should get the other one low score perfect so we don't always have to store it in a variable we could just Echo the result directly we could say Echo like that okay we just don't do it here like we would in an if statement we're echoing these directly in the if statement we don't do that here because this is returning a value and that's basically the difference here this isn't returning any kind of value whereas this statement is and we're just echoing the result and I sometimes think this is a lot easier to write it looks neater especially when we're working with HTML templates so down in the code if I just comment this out I just copied this then by the way if we do our PHP taxs now I want to Output the result that we get based on this check so I could say if you know that condition was true then output something and close those later on but using a turnery operator I just have it all on one line and I can Echo this out instead and we'll put this inside a P tag and we'll close that off at the end over here and that's how simple it is one line of code now instead of doing all of those open braces close braces Etc now we just have that one line of code and this still works okay we get that P tag if we inspect we can see it's in a P tag so that's pretty nice right that is a turn operator we have our condition first of all then the value to return if it's true and the value to return if it's false