Break and Continue

The break and continue statements are used to control the flow of loops in Java. They allow you to either exit a loop early (break) or skip the current iteration and move to the next one (continue).

break Statement

The break statement is used to immediately terminate the closest enclosing loop (for, while, or do-while) or switch statement. Once the break statement is encountered, the control exits the loop and proceeds with the next statement after the loop.

Syntax:

break;

Example: In this example, the loop terminates when i == 3.

for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    if (i == 3) {
        break;  // Exit the loop when i equals 3
    }
    System.out.println(i);
}

Output:

0
1
2

continue Statement

The continue statement skips the current iteration of the loop and proceeds with the next iteration. Unlike break, it does not terminate the loop; instead, it causes the loop to skip the remaining code in the current iteration and move to the next one.

Syntax:

continue;

Example: In this example, the loop skips the iteration when i is even.

for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    if (i % 2 == 0) {
        continue;  // Skip even numbers
    }
    System.out.println(i);
}

Output:

1
3