How to control loop in Kotlin

Welcome to kotlin Series

In this small post, we are going to discuss how to control loop in Kotlin.
Basically, we use 2 keywords for the control loop.
1. continue
2. break
if we want to skip one process, then we use to continue the keyword

for (a in 1..5){
        if (a==4){
            continue
        }
        println("A: $a")
    }

Output:

A: 1
A: 2
A: 3
A: 5

or if we stop the loop then we use break keyword

for (a in 1..5){
    if (a==4){
        break
     }
    println("A: $a")
}

Output:

A: 1
A: 2
A: 3

But in the nested loop if we want to stop the second loop after a selected value.
But in this case, if we use break keyword in the second loop-

for (a in 1..5){
        println("A: $a")

        for (b in 1..5){
            if (a == 4){
                break
            }
            println("B: $b")
        }
    }

and output:

A: 1
B: 1
B: 2
B: 3
B: 4
B: 5
A: 2
B: 1
B: 2
B: 3
B: 4
B: 5
A: 3
B: 1
B: 2
B: 3
B: 4
B: 5
A: 4
A: 5
B: 1
B: 2
B: 3
B: 4
B: 5

so we see loop is not stopped. It only stops inner loop after reaching the value of a is 4. no value of this loop is not printed and it repeated every time with increasing value with a
But our target on the basis of above value, we want to stop whole loop not only second loop after the value of a is 4.
For this case, we use loop keyword.
See the code-

loop@ for (a in 1..5){
        
        println("value a:$a")

        for (b in 1..4){
            if (a == 4){
                break@loop
            }

            println(" b:$b")
        }
    }

    println("Loop done")

Output:

value a:1
 b:1
 b:2
 b:3
 b:4
value a:2
 b:1
 b:2
 b:3
 b:4
value a:3
 b:1
 b:2
 b:3
 b:4
value a:4
Loop done

Oh! now our loop is stopped when the value of a is 4
sometimes we need to control the inner loop with the main loop condition. So loop keyword is saved a lot of time, we don't need to implement the complex logic.

Thank you for reading this post.
Happy coding