Strange use of greater than operator in Javascript

Question

Can anyone shed any light on this short JavaScript line of code? Not sure what it is doing, as the greater than symbol inside it seems counter-intuitive:

direction = currentImage > imageToGo ? 1 : -1;

Answer 1

If currentImage is greater than imageToGo, direction is assigned 1. If not, it is assigned -1.

Check out ternary operators.

Answer 2

It is shorthand for if-else condition or basically ternary operator.

So your code can be written as

if(currentImage > imageToGo){
   direction = 1;
}
else{
   direction = -1
}