Conditional (ternary) operator

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The conditional (ternary) operator is the only JavaScript operator that takes three operands: a condition followed by a question mark (?), then an expression to execute if the condition is truthy followed by a colon (:), and finally the expression to execute if the condition is falsy. This operator is frequently used as an alternative to an if...else statement.

Try it

function getFee(isMember) {
  return isMember ? "$2.00" : "$10.00";
}

console.log(getFee(true));
// Expected output: "$2.00"

console.log(getFee(false));
// Expected output: "$10.00"

console.log(getFee(null));
// Expected output: "$10.00"

Syntax

condition ? exprIfTrue : exprIfFalse

Parameters

condition

An expression whose value is used as a condition.

exprIfTrue

An expression which is executed if the condition evaluates to a truthy value (one which equals or can be converted to true).

exprIfFalse

An expression which is executed if the condition is falsy (that is, has a value which can be converted to false).

js
const age = 26;
const beverage = age >= 21 ? "Beer" : "Juice";
console.log(beverage); // "Beer"

Handling null values

One common usage is to handle a value that may be null:

js
const greeting = (person) => {
  const name = person ? person.name : "stranger";
  return `Howdy, ${name}`;
};

console.log(greeting({ name: "Alice" })); // "Howdy, Alice"
console.log(greeting(null)); // "Howdy, stranger"

Conditional chains

The ternary operator is right-associative, which means it can be "chained" in the following way, similar to an if … else if … else if … else chain:

js
function example() {
  return condition1 ? value1
    : condition2 ? value2
    : condition3 ? value3
    : value4;
}

This is equivalent to the following if...else chain.

js
function example() {
  if (condition1) {
    return value1;
  } else if (condition2) {
    return value2;
  } else if (condition3) {
    return value3;
  } else {
    return value4;
  }
}