Powershell Scripting - How to use less IF / IF-ELSE statements

I mainly code with PowerShell and 85% of my scripts are built with it.

The more I go on and code, the more I realize that I always use IF statements, which to be fair are sometimes needed, but since I put a lot of checks and throws in my code I find my scripts full of these statements. What's a different logical approach that I could take?

I tried looking online and found Ternary Operators but couldn't find good documentation for PowerShell.

Solution

Assuming you're using PowerShell (Core) 7+, you can use the following constructs to avoid the need for if statements in simple cases:

?:, the ternary conditional operator

# Alternative to:
#   $foo = if ($true) { 'bar' } else { 'baz' }
$foo = $true ? 'bar' : 'baz'

??, the null-coalescing operator

# Alternative to:
#   $foo = if ($null -ne $possiblyNull) { $possiblyNull } else { 'default' }
$foo = $possiblyNull ?? 'default'

?., the null-conditional operator
```
# Alternative to:
#   if ($null -ne $possiblyNull) { $possiblyNull.ToString() } 
${possiblyNull}?.ToString()
```
- Note the - unfortunate - need to enclose the variable name in {...} for ?. to work as intended, because - surprisingly - ? is a legal character in a PowerShell variable name.
- GitHub #11379 asks for this obscure requirement to be lifted, based on analysis that shows that only very little existing code, if any, would be impacted by interpreting a trailing ? as part of ?. rather than as part of the variable name. Sadly, despite claims to revisit the issue - see GitHub issue #14025 - no action was ever taken.
- Also note that while .? tests the object itself for being $null, there is currently no way to conditionally access an object's property that may or may not exist.
  - While such a feature isn't strictly necessary by default, because PowerShell simply returns $null if you access a non-existent property (e.g., $PSCulture.NoSuchProperty), it does matter when Set-StrictMode -Version 2 or higher is in effect, in which case attempts to access a non-existent property fail (which the current implementation of ?. does not prevent).
  - GitHub issue #15338 proposes adding support for such property-existence-conditional access, ideally by extending the semantics of ?.