PHP break and continue

We have already talked about loops. Inside the loop we can use 2 words

• break
• continue

Let’s see what they mean and what they do.

Break

We are telling php to jump out of the loop completely and execute the rest of the code.

For example we're looking for a value inside an array. we'll check each value inside the array to see if it is what we’re looking for. When we find our value we don’t care about the rest. so we want to jump completely out of the loop and execute the rest of the code.

<?php
$names = ['Vitto','Simon','Pratham','Hassib','Thomas','Tom'];

foreach($names as $name){
    if($name == 'Pratham'){
        // found him. there is no need to continue
        break;
    }
}
// execute the rest of the code

Continue

We are telling php to skip the current iteration of the loop and execute the next one.

For example we want to echo some of the values inside an array. So if the value doesn’t have what we specified, we'll to go to the next iteration. We don’t want to completely end the loop.

$numbers = [50,250,5421,3,756,93,43];

foreach($numbers as $number){
    // skip the numbers that are divisible by 3
    if($number % 3 == 0){
        continue;
    }
    echo $number;
}

Conclusion

Now you know about break and continue in PHP.

I recommend you to open a PHP files and write a loop. try the words continue and break and see what happens.

If you have any suggestions, questions, or opinions, please contact me. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Key takeaways

• continue in a loop PHP
• break in a look PHP