Use Labeled Statements in Swift

Written by Team Kodeco

A labeled statement is a statement that is assigned a label, which can then be used to control the flow of execution of nested loops and conditional statements. This is typically used with a break or continue statement to specify which loop or conditional statement to exit or continue.

Here’s an example of using a labeled statement to exit a nested loop:

outerloop: for i in 1...3 {
  for j in 1...3 {
    if i == 2 && j == 2 {
      // exit the outer loop when i is equal to 2 and j is equal to 2
      continue outerloop
    }
    print("i: \(i), j: \(j)")
  }
}
// Output: i: 1, j: 1
//         i: 1, j: 2
//         i: 1, j: 3
//         i: 2, j: 1
//         i: 3, j: 1
//         i: 3, j: 2
//         i: 3, j: 3

In this example, the outer loop iterates through the range 1…3, and the inner loop also iterates through the range 1…3.

When the values of i and j are both equal to 2, the continue statement is executed, which continues to the next iteration of outerloop, where i is now 3.

This effectively skips the printing of (2, 2) and (2, 3) in this example.