Lua Quick Start Guide

Breaking a loop

A loop might need to exit mid-execution, before the loop condition could evaluate to false. Or, perhaps there is a certain branch of logic that should exit a loop in case of an error. At any point during the loop's execution, the break keyword stops the execution of a loop immediately, as the following code snippet demonstrates:

x = 0while x < 10 do -- Execute 10 times!    print ("x is " .. x)    if x == 5 then        -- This stops the loop execution at 5        break    end    x = x + 1end

This code should loop from 0 to 9 and print out the value of x at each step. However, when x is 5, the loop breaks. Because of this break, this code only outputs 0 through 5.

If you are coming to Lua from another language, you might expect to see a continue statement. ...