Operators in C programming : Conditional Operators

  The operator ?: is known as conditional operator. Simple conditional operations can be carried out with conditional operator. An expression that make use of the conditional operator is called a conditional expression. Such an expression can be written in place of traditional ifelse statement.

A conditional expression is written in the form:

expression1 ? expression2 : expression3

When evaluating a conditional expression, expression1 is evaluated first. If expression1 is true, the value of expression2 is the value of conditional expression. If expression1 is false, the value of expression3 is the value of conditional expression.

For example:

a = 10 ;

b = 15 ;

x = (a > b) ? a : b ;

In this example, x will be assigned the value of b. This can be achieved by using the if_else statement as follows:

if (a<b)

x = a ;

else

x = b ;