Elegant way of setting default value for variable in Powershell 6.0?

Question

I have the following, which works but looks clunky:

if($config.contentDir){ 
    $contentDir = $config.contentDir
} else { 
    $contentDir = "contents"
}

Is there a nicer way of doing this? I have seen this answer here, but it isn't exactly "nicer". Just wondering if 6.0 brought any improvements?

I'm likely to be handling a large amount of config options, so it's going to get fairly messy.

Answer 1

This is a little shorter...

$contentDir = if ( $config.contentDir ) { $config.contentDir } else { "contents" }

You could also define an iif function:

function iif {
  param(
    [ScriptBlock] $testExpr,
    [ScriptBlock] $trueExpr,
    [ScriptBlock] $falseExpr
  )
  if ( & $testExpr ) {
    & $trueExpr
  }
  else {
    & $falseExpr
  }
}

Then you could shorten to this:

$contentDir = iif { $config.contentDir } { $config.contentDir } { "contents" }

As an aside, it looks like the next version of PowerShell will support the ternary operator (see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/powershell-7-preview-4/), so in the future, you'll be able to write something like:

$contentDir = $config.contentDir ? $config.contentDir : "contents"