Similar to switch
statements, the break
keyword can be used to terminate any of the loop types early. In our counting example of a while
loop, if we add a conditional and a break
statement:
$count = 1; while ($count < 11) { echo "The count is: " . $count . "\n"; if ($count === 5) { break; } $count += 1; }
The code will now count from 1 to 5 and then stop.
One downside of heavy usage of break
statements is that code can become less readable. In this example, a quick glance might give someone the impression that the loop will iterate until $count
is 10
. In reality, the buried break
statement is controlling the final iteration of the loop.
The continue
keyword is similar to break
except it only ends the current iteration early, not the entire loop. We could use this in our example to skip counting the number 5:
$count = 1; while ($count < 11) { if ($count === 5) { $count += 1; continue; } echo "The count is: " . $count . "\n"; $count += 1; }
Note that we needed to add an extra increment before the continue
($count += 1;
) to avoid being caught in an infinite loop.
Instructions
We have given you the countdown code from one of the previous exercises. We’d like to modify it so that it does not print the number 6.
Add an if
statement so that when $i
is 6
, it continues to the next loop iteration and does not print 6
.
Now we’d like to end the loop early after printing "Set!"
. There are a few ways you could do this, but use the keyword that you just learned.