Can you 'exit' a loop in PHP?

Question

I have a loop that is doing some error checking in my PHP code. Originally it looked something like this...

foreach($results as $result) {
    if (!$condition) {
        $halt = true;
        ErrorHandler::addErrorToStack('Unexpected result.');
    }

    doSomething();
 }

if (!$halt) {
    // do what I want cos I know there was no error
}

This works all well and good, but it is still looping through despite after one error it needn't. Is there a way to escape the loop?

Answer 1

You are looking for the break statement.

$arr = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'stop', 'five');
while (list(, $val) = each($arr)) {
    if ($val == 'stop') {
        break;    /* You could also write 'break 1;' here. */
    }
    echo "$val<br />\n";
}

Answer 2

As stated in other posts, you can use the break keyword. One thing that was hinted at but not explained is that the keyword can take a numeric value to tell PHP how many levels to break from.

For example, if you have three foreach loops nested in each other trying to find a piece of information, you could do 'break 3' to get out of all three nested loops. This will work for the 'for', 'foreach', 'while', 'do-while', or 'switch' structures.

$person = "Rasmus Lerdorf";
$found = false;

foreach($organization as $oKey=>$department)
{
   foreach($department as $dKey=>$group)
   {
      foreach($group as $gKey=>$employee)
      {
         if ($employee['fullname'] == $person)
         {
            $found = true;
            break 3;
         }
      } // group
   } // department
} // organization

Answer 3

break; leaves your loop.

continue; skips any code for the remainder of that loop and goes on to the next loop, so long as the condition is still true.

Answer 4

You can use the break keyword.

Answer 5

$arr = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'stop', 'five');
foreach ($arr as $val) {
    if ($val == 'stop') {
        break;    /* You could also write 'break 1;' here. */
    }
    echo "$val<br />\n";
}

Answer 6

All of these are good answers, but I would like to suggest one more that I feel is a better code standard. You may choose to use a flag in the loop condition that indicates whether or not to continue looping and avoid using break all together.

$arr = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'stop', 'five');
$length = count($arr);
$found = false;
for ($i = 0; $i < $length && !$found; $i++) {
    $val = $arr[$i];
    if ($val == 'stop') {
        $found = true; // this will cause the code to 
                       // stop looping the next time 
                       // the condition is checked
    }
    echo "$val<br />\n";
}

I consider this to be better code practice because it does not rely on the scope that break is used. Rather, you define a variable that indicates whether or not to break a specific loop. This is useful when you have many loops that may or may not be nested or sequential.