Question

I’m making some software which communicates with serial communication to some electronics through the COM port on my PC. I have to communicate with the SimplicTI protocol which I haven’t used before. I have found a library which enables me to do the communication but since I would like to evolve as a programmer I would like to understand every single statement of this library. In the source code of the library I stumbled upon the following variable declaration:

byte len = (data == null) ? (byte)0 : (byte)data.Length

What is going on here? I can’t seem to grasp this statement.

By the way the variable “data” is a byte array.

Answer 1

Equivalent to:

byte len;

if (data == null)
{
    len = (byte)0;
}
else
{
    len = (byte)data.length;
}