Sams Teach Yourself Java™ in 24 Hours, Sixth Edition

The Conditional Operator

The most complicated conditional statement in Java is the ternary operator ?.

You can use the ternary operator when you want to assign a value or display a value based on a condition. For example, consider a video game that sets the numberOfEnemies variable based on whether the skillLevel variable is greater than 5. One way you can do this is an if-else statement:

if (skillLevel > 5) {    numberOfEnemies = 10;} else {    numberOfEnemies = 5;}

A shorter way to do this is to use the ternary operator. A ternary expression has five parts:

• The condition to test, surrounded by parentheses, as in (skillLevel > 5)

• A question mark (?)

• The value to use if the condition is true

• A colon (:)

• The value to use if the condition ...