The Conditional Operator in Java - Java Language Tutorial

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The conditional operator ? allows to embed a conditional within an expression, an assignment of some sort. It can be seen as a shorter version of an if/else statement.
The operator can be seen as divided into three parts, or operands.

The first operand is separated from the second by a question mark (?). The second operand is separated from the third operand by a colon (:).

The first operand consists of the actual condition that evaluates to a boolean. If the condition evaluates to true, the second operand is executed. If the condition evaluates to false, the third operand is executed.

        int a = 1, b = 2;

        int c = (a == b) ? 3 : 4;

        System.out.println("Returned " + c);

Since the values of a and b is not equal, the variable c gets the value of the third operand and the output is:

Returned 4

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