Break statement in Java with example

The break statement is usually used in following two scenarios:

a) Use break statement to come out of the loop instantly. Whenever a break statement is encountered inside a loop, the control directly comes out of loop and the loop gets terminated for rest of the iterations. It is used along with if statement, whenever used inside loop so that the loop gets terminated for a particular condition.

The important point to note here is that when a break statement is used inside a nested loop, then only the inner loop gets terminated.

b) It is also used in switch case control. Generally all cases in switch case are followed by a break statement so that whenever the program control jumps to a case, it doesn’t execute subsequent cases (see the example below). As soon as a break is encountered in switch-case block, the control comes out of the switch-case body.

Syntax of break statement:
“break” word followed by semi colon

break;

Example ↬ Use of break in a while loop

In the example below, we have a while loop running from o to 100 but since we have a break statement that only occurs when the loop value reaches 2, the loop gets terminated and the control gets passed to the next statement in program after the loop body.

public class BreakExample {
   public static void main(String args[]){
      int num =0;
      while(num<=100)
      {
          System.out.println("Value of variable is: "+num);
          if (num==2)
          {
             break;
          }
          num++;
      }
      System.out.println("Out of while-loop");
  }
}

Output:-

Value of variable is: 0
Value of variable is: 1
Value of variable is: 2
Out of while-loop