Question

This is a Java/Groovy question, im doing this function to implement in a search mechanism in my website. I have two lists:

String [] lista = temp.split() // ignore the temp part
String [] searchLista = search.split() // ignore the search part

Basically, the lists are something like this:

    lista = {a, b, c, d}
    searchLista= {a, b, a, d}
    boolean test

I want to verify if, any element on list ‘lista’ is the same on ‘searchLista’. For that i did the following function:

for(int i = 0; i< lista.length-1; i++){

                for(int j = 0; j< searchLista.length-1; j++) {

                    if(lista[i].contains(searchLista[j])){
                        test = true
                        ##
                    }
                }
            }

My question is, if this validation is true: ‘lista[i].contains(searchLista[j])’, boolean variable test becomes true and next i want to jump outside both fors. A simple ‘break’ in the place of the ##s will do it?

Answer 1

(Are you deliberately missing out the last element of both lists, by the way?)

A normal break statement would just exit the inner loop.

If you want to break two levels, there are three common options:

• Make the condition for the outer loop something which you can make false in the body
• Make the whole loop a method, and just return from it
• Use a break with a label

Example of the last option:

// Code before loop
outerLoop:
for (...) {
    for (...) {
        if (...) {
            break outerLoop;
        }
    }
}

Personally I don’t use labels very often – I would rather use the “make the whole double loop a method” option if possible.