Intro to JavaScript Arrays break and continue

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, the learner will be able to implement the break and continue statements in JavaScript to control the flow of loops based on specific conditions.

break

The break statement lets you exit a loop early, dependent upon a condition.

// assuming `movies` is ['Barbie', 'Arrival', 'Get Out', 'Coco']
for (let movie of movies) {
  if (movie === 'Get Out') break;
  console.log(movie);
}

This results in the following output:

Barbie
Arrival

Thanks to the break statement, the loop exits early when it encounters 'Get Out'. The for...of statement provides extra control when iterating, like this ability to exit early easily.

continue

The continue statement is very similar to the break statement, only it doesn’t stop execution of the loop entirely, and instead only ends the current iteration of the loop. Let’s add a continue to the code above.

for (let movie of movies) {
  console.log("Another iteration");
  if (movie === 'Barbie') continue;
  if (movie === 'Get Out') break;
  console.log(movie);
}

Here’s the output:

Another iteration
Another iteration
Arrival
Another iteration

Here we can see that the movie 'Barbie' is never printed to the console, but the loop picks back up from the start of the next iteration.