Ternary operator in PowerShell

Question

From what I know, PowerShell doesn\'t seem to have a built-in expression for the so-called ternary operator.

For example, in the C language, which supports the terna

Answer 1

Here's an alternative custom function approach:

function Test-TernaryOperatorCondition {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param (
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline = $true, Mandatory = $true)]
        [bool]$ConditionResult
        ,
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, Position = 0)]
        [PSObject]$ValueIfTrue
        ,
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, Position = 1)]
        [ValidateSet(':')]
        [char]$Colon
        ,
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, Position = 2)]
        [PSObject]$ValueIfFalse
    )
    process {
        if ($ConditionResult) {
            $ValueIfTrue
        }
        else {
            $ValueIfFalse
        }
    }
}
set-alias -Name '???' -Value 'Test-TernaryOperatorCondition'

Example

1 -eq 1 |??? 'match' : 'nomatch'
1 -eq 2 |??? 'match' : 'nomatch'

Differences Explained

• Why is it 3 question marks instead of 1?
  • The ? character is already an alias for Where-Object.
  • ?? is used in other languages as a null coalescing operator, and I wanted to avoid confusion.
• Why do we need the pipe before the command?
  • Since I'm utilising the pipeline to evaluate this, we still need this character to pipe the condition into our function
• What happens if I pass in an array?
  • We get a result for each value; i.e. -2..2 |??? 'match' : 'nomatch' gives: match, match, nomatch, match, match (i.e. since any non-zero int evaluates to true; whilst zero evaluates to false).
  • If you don't want that, convert the array to a bool; ([bool](-2..2)) |??? 'match' : 'nomatch' (or simply: [bool](-2..2) |??? 'match' : 'nomatch')