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Why would you want to exit a loop?

Paul Hudson @twostraws June 5th 2020

Updated for Xcode 15

Swift’s break keyword lets us exit a loop immediately, regardless of what kind of loop we’re talking about. A lot of the time you won’t need this, because you’re looping over items in an array and want to process them all, or because you’re counting from 1 through 10 and want to handle all those values.

However, sometimes you do want to end your loop prematurely. For example, if you had an array of scores and you want to figure out how many of them the player achieved without getting a 0, you might write this:

let scores = [1, 8, 4, 3, 0, 5, 2]
var count = 0

for score in scores {
    if score == 0 {
        break
    }

    count += 1
}

print("You had \(count) scores before you got 0.")

Without break we’d need to continue looping through scores even after we found the first 0, which is wasteful.