break and continue

Up until now, we haven't really done any conditional branching in our scripts. Everything we did was linear, even loops. Our script was able to execute commands line by line, starting from the first one, and if we had a loop, it was running until our conditions that we stated at the loop start were met. This means that our loops have a fixed, predetermined number of iterations. Sometimes, or to be more precise often, we need to do something that breaks this idea.

Getting ready

Imagine this example – you have a loop that has to iterate a number of times unless a condition is met. We said that our loops have the number of iterations fixed at the start of the loop, so we obviously need a way to end the loop prematurely.

This is why we have a command called break. As the name suggests, this command breaks the loop by escaping from the command block it is included in and finishing the loop, regardless of the conditions that were used in the definition...