Question

I’ve found myself writing a lot of code similar to this:

$('.selector').addClass(condition ? 'class' : '');

I know this may be silly and whiny, but I was just curious if there was a way to do that without the false condition in Javascript. I’ve looked around and haven’t really found any operator that can do that, but I could be (and hope I am) wrong.

I’m not necessarily looking to optimize my code, this is just curiosity 🙂

Thanks.

Answer 1

JavaScript’s && operator short-circuits. You’ll see something like this used commonly in a number of scripts and libraries:

condition && $('.selector').addClass('class');

Or as mgibsonbr’s comment states, you can simply && within the method itself:

$('.selector').addClass(condition && 'class');

It’s much less intuitive, though, as it’s not a commonly-known fact that a && b results in b in JavaScript when both values are truthy, and not true unlike in other languages.