String concatenation does not work properly in Java when concatenating 2 results of ternary operators

Question

Dear Java guru \'s!

Can you, please, explain me, why String concatenation does not work properly in Java when concatenating 2 results of ternary operators?

Answer 1

It's interpreted as following code:

String x = str != null ? "A" : ("B" + str == null ? "C" : "D");

"B" + str is not null so it will be evaluated as "D"

With help of OSborn's answer you can do what you expect with this code:

String x = (str != null ? "A" : "B") + (str == null ? "C" : "D");

and since you are just comparing str with null and both conditional statements are almost the same, it can be shortened like this:

 String x = (str != null ? "AD" : "BC");