As the Python community differentiates between the ternary operator and the if-else condition, the former is said to be a better way of writing conditional statements.
The reason behind using the ternary operator is simple, if-else condition blocks tend to be messy and thus it becomes really a tedious task to write a long series of such blocks for a simple condition.
This operator was added to Python in version 2.5. It simply replaces the multiline If-Else statement with a single line condition.
value_if_true if condition else value_if_false As you can see above Conditional expressions in python makes code more compact.
Here are different ways a Ternary operator python can be implemented as:
Simple method of using ternary operators:
Let’s see an example of a simple ternary operator method
x,z=8,5
print("x" if x>z else "z")xIf we had to write the same code in an If and else statement it would have looked something like:
x,z=8,5
if x>z:
print("x")
else:
print("z")1. Using Python Tuples
Conditional Expressions can be used with tuples
a, b = 8, 10
print( (b, a) [a < b] )8The above code works as the following syntax:
(if_test_is_false, if_test_is_true)[test] 2. Using Python Dictionaries
Dictionaries are ordered collections of data values that can be changeable but do not allow duplicates. It stores data values in key: value pairs.
Here’s how you can use the ternary python operator with dictionaries in python:
a, b = 7, 10
print({True: a, False: b} [a < b])73. Using Lambdas
We can use Lambda functions to act as a ternary operator. Lamba function can be more efficient compared to tuples and dictionaries.
a, b = 5, 25
print((lambda: b, lambda: a)[a < b]())5Nested Python Ternary Operator
We can chain these operators as nested if-else:
a, b = 35, 20
print ("Both a and b are equal" if a == b else "a is greater than b"
if a > b else "b is greater than a")a is greater than b
Above were some of the ways ternary operators in python works. This can be a easy way to test code in a compact rather than using If and else statements. Although both has its benefits, its on you to use the one which best suits the situation in the code.
