Question

I’d love to know what this means so I can google it as I see it all the time and it seems to be very useful

(($winstate==1)?'X':'O')

edit: The vars are irrelevant.

Thanks guys

Answer 1

That’s called a ternary operator, it’s PHP’s only ternary operator, and it’s shorthand for a conditional:

if($winstate == 1){
    return 'X';
}else{
    return 'O';
}

It’s frequently used when the conditional test results in an assignment or returns something, in this case suppose you wanted to assign ‘X’ or ‘O’ to a variable $move, it’s far more concise to write:

$move = ($winstate == 1) ? 'X' : 'O';