note 9801 added to Expressions

The ternary conditional operator is a useful way of avoiding inconvenient if statements. They can even be used in the middle of a string concatenation, if you use parentheses. Example: if ( $wakka ) { $string = 'foo' ; } else { $string = 'bar' ; } The above can be expressed like the following: $string = $wakka ? 'foo' : 'bar' ; If $wakka is true, $string is assigned 'foo', and if it's false, $string is assigned 'bar'. To do the same in a concatenation, try: $string = $otherString . ( $wakka = 'foo' : 'bar' ) ; http://www.php.net/manual/language.expressions.php