Assignment inside Perl ternary conditional operator problems

Question

This snippet of Perl code in my program is giving the wrong result.

$condition ? $a = 2 : $a = 3 ;
print $a;

No matter what the value of

Answer 1

Just to extend the previous answer... If, for whatever reason, the assignments need to be part of the conditional, you'd want to write it thusly:

$condition ? ($a=2) : ($a=3);

This would be useful if you're assigning to different variables based on the condition.

$condition ? ($a=2) : ($b=3);

And if you're choosing the variable, but assigning the same thing no matter what, you could even do this:

($condition ? $a : $b) = 3;