Java If ... Else

Java Conditions and If Statements

You already know that Java supports the usual logical conditions from mathematics:

• Less than: a < b
• Less than or equal to: a <= b
• Greater than: a > b
• Greater than or equal to: a >= b
• Equal to a == b
• Not Equal to: a != b

You can use these conditions to perform different actions for different decisions.

Java has the following conditional statements:

• Use if to specify a block of code to be executed, if a specified condition is true
• Use else to specify a block of code to be executed, if the same condition is false
• Use else if to specify a new condition to test, if the first condition is false
• Use switch to specify many alternative blocks of code to be executed

The if Statement

Use the if statement to specify a block of Java code to be executed if a condition is true.

if (condition) {
  // block of code to be executed if the condition is true
}

In the example below, we test two values to find out if 20 is greater than 18. If the condition is true, print some text:

if (20 > 18) {
  System.out.println("20 is greater than 18");
}

We can also test variables:

int x = 20;
int y = 18;
if (x > y) {
  System.out.println("x is greater than y");
}

Example explained

In the example above we use two variables, x and y, to test whether x is greater than y (using the > operator). As x is 20, and y is 18, and we know that 20 is greater than 18, we print to the screen that "x is greater than y".