Using ternaries for variable assignment in Python

One of my favorite "tricks" as a programmer is to condense conditional logic (i.e. if/else blocks) into one line when assigning variables. The ternary operator makes this possible.

If you come from a JavaScript background like I do, you may have seen this done before with a question mark.

const isSuccess = data.response ? true : false

Essentially, this means if data.response is defined we should assign isSuccess the value of true. Otherwise, we'll set it to false.

Recently, I used a ternary operation in Python for the first time. While it, ultimately, works the same way I found the slight difference between languages interesting.

To recreate the snippet above in Python, we could write:

is_success = True if data.response else False

In this case, the right-side of the assignment leads with the "truthy" value, as opposed to the value we're checking. It's not a big difference, but worth noting the difference in API.

The ? operator has a special place in my heart because I've used it so much. However, Python's ternary operator syntax is probably easier to read for beginners.