# Intersection of conditions

If I have a list of conditions:

{cond1,cond2,cond3}


and I want to use an If[] statement to test the intersection of these conditions (or, more generally, any subset of them, but let's start with the basic case first):

If[cond1&&cond2&&cond3,a,b]


How would I do that?

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Something like conds = {cond1, cond2, cond3}; If[And @@ conds, a, b]? –  Ｊ. Ｍ. Oct 6 '12 at 13:23
Yes. Thanks J.M. I feel like I'm asking lots of quite trivial questions, but I have yet to get a feel for the syntax, and haven't got a good idea yet of what I need to search for in the documentation to find what I need. –  Ooku Oct 6 '12 at 13:33

Don't worry about whether these are trivial questions: they are good opportunities to explain a little more about Mathematica's syntax.

The first point is that what you already had works fine. You can confirm this using FullForm.

If[cond1 && cond2 && cond3, a, b] // FullForm
(*If[And[cond1,cond2,cond3],a,b]*)


If you preferred, you could type out the And construction explicitly.

J.M.'s comment invokes the Apply function to change the Head of a List of things, in this case the conditions, to And.

And @@ {cond1, cond2, cond3} // FullForm
(* And[cond1,cond2,cond3] *)


Or equivalently

FullForm[Apply[And, {cond1, cond2, cond3}]]
(* And[cond1,cond2,cond3] *)


The FullForm is just for explication; you wouldn't use it in normal operations. So the short syntax for the above is:

And @@ {cond1, cond2, cond3}
(* cond1&&cond2&&cond3 *)


The usefulness of storing your list of conditions as a list is that it is then easier to use various other list-manipulation techniques to get those subsets of conditions mentioned in your question.

And @@ (Most@{cond1, cond2, cond3})
(* cond1&&cond2 *)

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