Fundamentals for Beginners

What are Operators, Operands, and Expressions?Types of Operators Based on Operand Count Standard TradingView Operators Assignment Operator Arithmetic Operators Accessing Historical Data Conditional Logic in Pine Script Boolean Operators in TradingView Creating Custom Functions Operator Precedence in TradingView Citations

In TradingView, operators are essential for coding scripts. But what exactly are operators, and how do they work?

What are Operators, Operands, and Expressions?

An operator is a code element that performs an action on one or more values (called operands) to produce a new value. For example, in 5 + 3, the + is the operator, and 5 and 3 are operands. The result is 8, which is the new value created by the operator.

A statement can contain multiple operators, and their evaluation order depends on their priority. An expression refers to a piece of code that returns a value, often containing operators. For instance:

45 * 9.12 returns 410.4

ema(close, 20) returns the 20-period Exponential Moving Average

(high - low) / 2 returns half of the bar's range

Types of Operators Based on Operand Count

Operators in TradingView can be classified by how many operands they act upon:

Unary operators: Operate on one value (e.g., close returns the negative closing price).

Binary operators: Operate on two values (e.g., close > open compares closing and opening prices).

Ternary operator: Takes three operands (e.g., the conditional ternary operator ?:, which acts like an if/else statement).

Standard TradingView Operators

Assignment Operator

The assignment operator (=) stores values in variables or assigns values to function arguments.

Arithmetic Operators

Arithmetic operators include addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*), division (/), and modulus (%). These operators allow you to perform basic mathematical operations. Additionally, strings can be concatenated using the + operator.

Accessing Historical Data

Historical data is crucial for most scripts. You can retrieve values from previous bars using the history referencing operator ([ ]). This operator works with built-in variables, custom variables, functions, and more.

Conditional Logic in Pine Script

While TradingView lacks traditional if/else statements, you can mimic this behavior using:

Ternary operator (?:): This acts like a concise if/else statement by returning one value if a condition is true and another if it’s false.

Boolean Operators in TradingView

Boolean values (true/false) are handled using comparison and logical operators:

Comparison operators: Compare numbers (e.g., >, <, ==) to return true/false.

Logical operators: Combine multiple true/false expressions (e.g., and, or, not) into a single boolean result.

Creating Custom Functions

You can create custom functions using the function declaration operator (=>). This allows you to define reusable code blocks for both single-line and multi-line functions.