Break And Continue Statements

Break And Continue Statements:

In this C tutorial for beginners, we are going to discuss a very useful facility of C++ which are break and continue statements.

Break statement in C:

Previously, we have seen that break statement was used in a switch structure. Similarly, you can use break statement in while, for and do…while loops. When a break statement executes in a repetition structure, it immediately exits from the repetition structure. There are times when our requirement is met but the loop still doesn’t finish so, we use this break statement condition. This make our code efficient and less time consuming.

It is used for two purposes:

• To exit early from the loop.
• To skip the remainder of the switch structure.

The use of break in c can eliminate the use of many (flags) variables. However, the break statements in c should be used very carefully as the excessive use of it will make your code an ugly code. Use it just when you’re sure that what you wanted from the code has been achieved.

Example of break in c:

 int sum=0, num=0;
cin >> num;
while(cin)
{
    if (num<0)
    {
        cout << “Negative number found\n”;
        cin>>num;
        break;
}
    sum+=num;
    cin>>num;
}

Continue statement in c:

Continue statement in c is used in while, for and do…while loop. When continue statement executes, it skips all remaining statements in loop for that certain iteration and proceeds with the next iteration of the loop. 

Let’s take an example of continue in c:

int sum=0, num=0;
cin >> num;
while(cin)
{
    if (num<0)
    {
        cout << “Negative number found\n”;
        cin>>num;
        continue;
}
    sum+=num;
    cin>>num;
}

In this program, if the num is negative then it doesn’t execute the further statements and proceeds with the further iteration else it does.

Final words:

 In this c tutorial for beginners of shapes in c we discussed about break and continue statements in detail.
These are very important and commonly used conditions in C++. You can understand and learn it here.