Lecture 27:- Break and Continue

In Java, break and continue are two control flow statements that allow you to modify the behavior of loops.

1. break statement:
   • The break statement is used to terminate the enclosing loop prematurely. When encountered, the loop immediately exits, and the program continues with the first statement after the loop.
   • The break statement is commonly used when a certain condition is met, and there's no need to continue with the rest of the loop iterations.

Example of using break:

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public class BreakExample {    public static void main(String[] args) {        for (int i = 1; i <= 5; i++) {            System.out.println("Iteration " + i);            if (i == 3) {                break; // Exit the loop when i equals 3            }        }        System.out.println("Loop terminated");    } }

Output:

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Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Loop terminated

In the example above, the loop runs from 1 to 5, and when i becomes 3, the break statement is encountered, causing the loop to terminate prematurely.

1. continue statement:
   • The continue statement is used to skip the current iteration of a loop and move on to the next iteration.
   • When the continue statement is encountered, the program jumps to the next iteration, and any code after the continue statement within the loop's body will be skipped for the current iteration.

Example of using continue:

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public class ContinueExample {    public static void main(String[] args) {        for (int i = 1; i <= 5; i++) {            if (i == 3) {                continue; // Skip the current iteration when i equals 3            }            System.out.println("Iteration " + i);        }        System.out.println("Loop finished");    } }

Output:

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Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 4 Iteration 5 Loop finished

In the example above, the loop runs from 1 to 5, and when i becomes 3, the continue statement is encountered. This causes the program to skip the code inside the loop for that iteration and move on to the next iteration.

Both break and continue statements are useful tools to control the flow of loop execution in specific scenarios and make your code more efficient and readable. However, they should be used judiciously to avoid creating confusing or hard-to-read code.