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Arithmetic and Logical Operators

An operator is a type of expression that transforms or combines one or more other expressions. Operators either combine two values in some way to produce a third result value, or transform a single given value to produce a single result.

Operators that work on two values place an operator symbol between the two values, similar to mathematical notation: 1 + 2. Operators that work on only one value place an operator symbol before that value, like !true.

The OpenTofu language has a set of operators for both arithmetic and logic, which are similar to operators in programming languages such as JavaScript or Ruby.

When multiple operators are used together in an expression, they are evaluated in the following order of operations:

  1. !, - (multiplication by -1)
  2. *, /, %
  3. +, - (subtraction)
  4. >, >=, <, <=
  5. ==, !=
  6. &&
  7. ||

Use parentheses to override the default order of operations. Without parentheses, higher levels will be evaluated first, so OpenTofu will interpret 1 + 2 * 3 as 1 + (2 * 3) and not as (1 + 2) * 3.

The different operators can be gathered into a few different groups with similar behavior, as described below. Each group of operators expects its given values to be of a particular type. OpenTofu will attempt to convert values to the required type automatically, or will produce an error message if automatic conversion is impossible.

Arithmetic Operators​

The arithmetic operators all expect number values and produce number values as results:

  • a + b returns the result of adding a and b together.
  • a - b returns the result of subtracting b from a.
  • a * b returns the result of multiplying a and b.
  • a / b returns the result of dividing a by b.
  • a % b returns the remainder of dividing a by b. This operator is generally useful only when used with whole numbers.
  • -a returns the result of multiplying a by -1.

OpenTofu supports some other less-common numeric operations as functions. For example, you can calculate exponents using the pow function.

Equality Operators​

The equality operators both take two values of any type and produce boolean values as results.

  • a == b returns true if a and b both have the same type and the same value, or false otherwise.
  • a != b is the opposite of a == b.

Because the equality operators require both arguments to be of exactly the same type in order to decide equality, we recommend using these operators only with values of primitive types or using explicit type conversion functions to indicate which type you are intending to use for comparison.

Comparisons between structural types may produce surprising results if you are not sure about the types of each of the arguments. For example, var.list == [] may seem like it would return true if var.list were an empty list, but [] actually builds a value of type tuple([]) and so the two values can never match. In this situation it's often clearer to write length(var.list) == 0 instead.

Comparison Operators​

The comparison operators all expect number values and produce boolean values as results.

  • a < b returns true if a is less than b, or false otherwise.
  • a <= b returns true if a is less than or equal to b, or false otherwise.
  • a > b returns true if a is greater than b, or false otherwise.
  • a >= b returns true if a is greater than or equal to b, or false otherwise.

Logical Operators​

The logical operators all expect bool values and produce bool values as results.

  • a || b returns true if either a or b is true, or false if both are false.
  • a && b returns true if both a and b are true, or false if either one is false.
  • !a returns true if a is false, and false if a is true.

OpenTofu does not have an operator for the "exclusive OR" operation. If you know that both operators are boolean values then exclusive OR is equivalent to the != ("not equal") operator.

The logical operators in OpenTofu do not short-circuit, meaning var.foo || var.foo.bar will produce an error message if var.foo is null because both var.foo and var.foo.bar are evaluated.