Breaking the nested loop

php loops nested-loops
user1355300 picture user1355300 · Jul 23, 2012 · Viewed 46.7k times · Source

I'm having problem with nested loop. I have multiple number of posts, and each post has multiple number of images.

I want to get total of 5 images from all posts. So I am using nested loop to get the images, and want to break the loop when the number reaches to 5. The following code will return the images, but does not seem to break the loop.

foreach($query->posts as $post){
        if ($images = get_children(array(
                    'post_parent' => $post->ID,
                    'post_type' => 'attachment',
                    'post_mime_type' => 'image'))
            ){              
                $i = 0;
                foreach( $images as $image ) {
                    ..
                    //break the loop?
                    if (++$i == 5) break;
                }               
            }
}

Answer

dynamic picture dynamic · Jul 23, 2012

Unlike other languages such as C/C++, in PHP you can use the optional param of break like this:

break 2;

In this case if you have two loops such that:

while(...) {
   while(...) {
      // do
      // something

      break 2; // skip both
   }
}

break 2 will skip both while loops.

Doc: http://php.net/manual/en/control-structures.break.php

This makes jumping over nested loops more readable than for example using goto of other languages

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