Break Statement in R Programming Language: Syntax and Usage

A break statement is used inside a loop (repeat, for, while) to stop the iterations and flow the control outside of the loop.

In a nested looping situation, where there is a loop inside another loop, this statement exits from the innermost loop that is being evaluated.

The syntax of break statement is:

if (test_expression) {
break
}

Note: the break statement can also be used inside the  else branch of if...else statement.

Flowchart of break statement

Example 1: break statement

x <- 1:5
for (val in x) {
if (val == 3){
break
}
print(val)
}

Output

[1] 1
[1] 2

In this example, we iterate over the vector x, which has consecutive numbers from 1 to 5.

Inside the for loop we have used a if condition to break if the current value is equal to 3.

As we can see from the output, the loop terminates when it encounters the break statement.