Breaking and continuing

The break and continue statements are related and allow us to control how our loops behave. We can also use them in switch statements. It’s important not to use them outside of loops or switch statements as they can lead to unpredictable behavior. A break statement can be used to stop a loop iterating altogether, while continue can be used to stop an iteration and move on to the next one. Let’s look at break first.

The break statement

Let’s play with the trusty while loop. Type this:

$number = 0
while ( $number -ne 5) { $number ++
if ($number -eq 3) {
    break
    }
    Write-Host "The number is $number"
}

Hopefully, you’ll see that the last number printed is 2. The conditional if statement says to stop looping if $number is 3. The break statement only acts on the loop it is nested inside.

The continue statement

The continue statement stops the...