I suggest reading up on Groovy Truthiness:
http://groovy-lang.org/semantics.html#Groovy-Truth
There are a few things the resolve to boolean "false" when you put a
non-boolean into a boolean space.
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:27 PM, Henrik Martin <hen...@netgate.net> wrote:
> Sure, it makes sense. I guess my confusion originated in other uses with
> Strings. Like this:
>
> foo = 'hello'
> foo = foo ?: 'goodbye' // foo == 'hello'
>
> where foo ends up being set to 'hello'. I guess a String as the left hand
> side expression of the Elvis operator evaluates to itself instead of
> boolean true. While it seems to be true that if it's null, it's the same as
> false? Like this:
>
> foo = null
> foo = foo ?: 'goodbye' // foo == 'goodbye'
>
> So a null reference is equivalent to boolean false. I guess that makes
> sense. The cases that surprise me the most are these:
>
> foo = '' // empty string
> foo = foo ?: 'goodbye' // foo == 'goodbye'
>
> and
>
> foo = ' ' // single space
> foo = foo ?: 'goodbye' // foo = ' '
>
> I guess I should RTFM a little more thoroughly :-)
>
> -H
>
>
> On 4/12/16 12:54 AM, Tankerbay wrote:
>
> Well, you seem to know what's happening.
> sleepFor = sleepFor > 0 ?: 10
> is equivalent to:
> sleepFor = (sleepFor > 0 ) ?: 10
>
> So the entire expression (sleepFor > 0) is evaluated and, if found to be
> true, returned as the result of the elvis expression.
>
> Elvis operator like this:
> Z = X ?: Default
> is equivalent to:
> Z = X ? X : Default
> not
> Z = X ? (some part of X) : Default
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:43 PM, Henrik Martin <hen...@netgate.net> wrote:
>
>> And of course I meant to say "... and my println statement prints 10",
>> not 910. :-)
>>
>> -H
>>
>>
>> On 4/12/16 12:41 AM, Henrik Martin wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings. I ran into this little surprise with the Elvis operator
>>> today. I guess it must boil down to my misunderstanding of how the operator
>>> work. I have a method that tries to calculate a value based on an input. If
>>> the input value is set to -1, I'd like to change it to a positive value
>>> (which is calculated, but in the test I just hard coded it to 10). In the
>>> process of doing so, I ran into a surprise. Here's a Spock test case that
>>> illustrates it:
>>>
>>> import spock.lang.Specification
>>>
>>> class ElvisTest extends Specification {
>>> def "test"() {
>>> setup:
>>> def sleepFor = -1
>>> sleepFor = sleepFor > 0 ?: 10
>>> println sleepFor
>>> sleepFor = 972
>>> sleepFor = sleepFor > 0 ?: 10
>>> println sleepFor
>>> }
>>> }
>>> When sleepFor is initialized to -1, the operator works as I expected it
>>> and my println statement prints 910. If I initialize sleepFor to some other
>>> value like the one in the test, all of a sudden the result of the Elvis
>>> operator is true instead of an integer. I naïvely thought that ?: would
>>> yield the numeric value of the sleepFor variable in the left hand
>>> expression instead of the boolean result of it (as in sleepFor > 0). What
>>> am I missing? In this case, I could always use the Java style of:
>>>
>>> sleepFor = sleepFor > 0 ? sleepFor : 10
>>>
>>> but the whole point of the Elvis operator is brevity, and this behavior
>>> was a small surprise to me. Thanks,
>>>
>>> -H
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
