Not grasping this use of ternary operators

[jswannabe]

I am very new to php (but not to programming) and have purchased an open source code shopping cart that I am trying to dissect.

I've run into the following section of code which deals with several variables and also uses ternary operators - problem is I not figuring out what is happening. Here's one of the code snippets:

if (isset($_GET["order_without_billing_address"]) || isset($_POST["order_without_billing_address"]))
		$order_without_billing_address = isset($_GET["order_without_billing_address"])?
				$_GET["order_without_billing_address"]:$_POST["order_without_billing_address"];

Can someone explain in layman's terms what I've got going on here? Help Appreciated!

Thanks!!!

 

[jpadie]

ternary is just if true then something else someother thing

so essentially in pseudo code

if 
  there is a query variable called order_without_billing_address
  OR
  there is a form variable with the same name
  THEN
  assign the variable $order_without_billing_address to the query var (if is set) or the POST var (if not).

BUT ... this code is really really bad. very sloppy coding style.

it would have been better to use this code

$order_without_billing = (!empty($_GET['order_without_billing'] ? $_GET['order_without_billing] : (!empty($_POST['order_without_billing'] ? $_POST['order_without_billing'] : FALSE);

or even

if (empty($_POST['order_without_billing)){
 if (empty($_GET['order_without_billing'])){
   $order_without_billing = false;
 } else {
   $order_without_billing = $_GET['order_without_billing'];
 }
} else {
  $order_without_billing = $_POST['order_without_billing']
}

or even more adventurous

import_request_variables('pg', 'tmp_');
$var = 'order_without_billing';
$$var = (isset(${tmp_$var})) ? ${tmp_$var} : false;