Ruby - Conditional or Ternary operator (?:)

The Ruby conditional or ternary operator returns one of the two values based on the value of boolean expression. It is kind of similar to the if-else statement and helps to write the if-else statements in a short way.

Syntax

#returns value1 if expression is true
#returns value2 if expression is false
expression ? value1 : value2

Return Value

Returns value1 if the expression is evaluated to be true, and value2 if the expression is evaluated to be false.

Example:

In the example below, the ternary operator is used to find out the maximum of two numbers.

x = 50
y = 100

#maximum of two value
max = (x > y) ? x : y

#displaying the result
puts "Maximum value = #{max}"

The output of the above code will be:

Maximum value = 100

❮ Ruby - Operators