break and continue
break and continue
In C++, break and continue are control statements that alter the flow of a loop.
The break statement is used to immediately terminate the execution of a loop, and to jump to the statement following the end of the loop. When the break statement is executed inside a loop, the loop is exited regardless of whether the loop condition has been met.
For example, the following code uses a for loop to iterate over the values 1 to 10, but terminates the loop early when the value of i is equal to 5:
for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {
if (i == 5) {
break;
}
std::cout << i << "";
}
The continue statement, on the other hand, is used to skip the current iteration of a loop and to immediately jump to the next iteration. When the continue statement is executed inside a loop, the remaining statements inside the loop are skipped for the current iteration and the loop continues with the next iteration.
For example, the following code uses a while loop to iterate over the values 1 to 10, but skips over the value of 5:
int i =0;
while (i< 10) {
i++;
if (i == 5) {
continue;
}
std::cout << i << "";
}
Both break and continue statements can be used in for, while, and do-while loops to alter the flow of the loop. However, it’s important to use them judiciously to avoid creating code that is hard to read and maintain.