Question

As the question asks, is there a control sequence in R similar to C’s ternary operator? If so, how do you use it? Thanks!

Answer 1

As if is function in R and returns the latest evaluation, if-else is equivalent to ?:.

> a <- 1
> x <- if(a==1) 1 else 2
> x
[1] 1
> x <- if(a==2) 1 else 2
> x
[1] 2

The power of R is vectorization. The vectorization of the ternary operator is ifelse:

> a <- c(1, 2, 1)
> x <- ifelse(a==1, 1, 2)
> x
[1] 1 2 1
> x <- ifelse(a==2, 1, 2)
> x
[1] 2 1 2

---

Just kidding, you can define c-style ?::

`?` <- function(x, y)
    eval(
      sapply(
        strsplit(
          deparse(substitute(y)), 
          ":"
      ), 
      function(e) parse(text = e)
    )[[2 - as.logical(x)]])

here, you don’t need to take care about brackets:

> 1 ? 2*3 : 4
[1] 6
> 0 ? 2*3 : 4
[1] 4
> TRUE ? x*2 : 0
[1] 2
> FALSE ? x*2 : 0
[1] 0

but you need brackets for assignment 🙁

> y <- 1 ? 2*3 : 4
[1] 6
> y
[1] 1
> y <- (1 ? 2*3 : 4)
> y
[1] 6

---

Finally, you can do very similar way with c:

`?` <- function(x, y) {
  xs <- as.list(substitute(x))
  if (xs[[1]] == as.name("<-")) x <- eval(xs[[3]])
  r <- eval(sapply(strsplit(deparse(substitute(y)), ":"), function(e) parse(text = e))[[2 - as.logical(x)]])
  if (xs[[1]] == as.name("<-")) {
    xs[[3]] <- r
        eval.parent(as.call(xs))
  } else {
    r
  }
}       

You can get rid of brackets:

> y <- 1 ? 2*3 : 4
> y
[1] 6
> y <- 0 ? 2*3 : 4
> y
[1] 4
> 1 ? 2*3 : 4
[1] 6
> 0 ? 2*3 : 4
[1] 4

These are not for daily use, but maybe good for learning some internals of R language.