Python Morsels: Python's ternary operator

Table of contents

1. Python doesn't have typical ternary operators
2. Python's conditional expressions (a.k.a. inline if)
3. Readability of conditional expressions
4. Python's ternary-equivalent is inside-out

Python doesn't have typical ternary operators

Here we have an if-else statement:

ifamount==1:noun="item"else:noun="items"

ifamount==1:noun="item"else:noun="items"

Many programming languages allow you to take code like this, that assigns a variable to one of two values based on a condition, and turn that into a single line of code:

noun=amount==1?"item":"items"

noun=amount==1?"item":"items"

That strange ?...: syntax is often called a ternary operator.

Python doesn't support that syntax: that isn't valid Python code. Instead, we have something called a conditional expression.

Python's conditional expressions (a.k.a. inline if)

Python's conditional expression looks like …