14.13 The break Statement

A break statement transfers control out of an enclosing statement.

BreakStatement:

	break Identifieropt ;

A break statement with no label attempts to transfer control to the innermost enclosing switch, while, do, or for statement; this statement, which is called the break target, then immediately completes normally. To be precise, a break statement with no label always completes abruptly, the reason being a break with no label. If no switch, while, do, or for statement encloses the break statement, a compile-time error occurs.

A break statement with label Identifier attempts to transfer control to the enclosing labeled statement (§14.6) that has the same Identifier as its label; this statement, which is called the break target, then immediately completes normally. In this case, the break target need not be a while, do, for, or switch statement. To be precise, a break statement with label Identifier always completes abruptly, the reason being a break with label Identifier. If no labeled statement with Identifier as its label encloses the break statement, a compile-time error occurs.

It can be seen, then, that a break statement always completes abruptly.

The preceding descriptions say "attempts to transfer control" rather than just "transfers control" because if there are any try statements (§14.18) within the break target whose try blocks contain the break statement, then any finally clauses of those try statements are executed, in order, innermost to outermost, before control is transferred to the break target. Abrupt completion of a finally clause can disrupt the transfer of control initiated by a break statement.

In the following example, a mathematical graph is represented by an array of arrays. A graph consists of a set of nodes and a set of edges; each edge is an arrow that points from some node to some other node, or from a node to itself. In this example it is assumed that there are no redundant edges; that is, for any two nodes P and Q, where Q may be the same as P, there is at most one edge from P to Q. Nodes are represented by integers, and there is an edge from node i to node edges[i][j] for every i and j for which the array reference edges[i][j] does not throw an IndexOutOfBoundsException.

The task of the method loseEdges, given integers i and j, is to construct a new graph by copying a given graph but omitting the edge from node i to node j, if any, and the edge from node j to node i, if any:

class Graph {
	int edges[][];
	public Graph(int[][] edges) { this.edges = edges; }

	public Graph loseEdges(int i, int j) {
		int n = edges.length;
		int[][] newedges = new int[n][];
		for (int k = 0; k < n; ++k) {

			edgelist: {
				int z;

				search: {
					if (k == i) {
						for (z = 0; z < edges[k].length; ++z)
							if (edges[k][z] == j)
								break search;
					} else if (k == j) {
						for (z = 0; z < edges[k].length; ++z)
							if (edges[k][z] == i)
								break search;
					}
					// No edge to be deleted; share this list.
					newedges[k] = edges[k];
					break edgelist;
				}//search
				// Copy the list, omitting the edge at position z.
				int m = edges[k].length - 1;
				int ne[] = new int[m];
				System.arraycopy(edges[k], 0, ne, 0, z);
				System.arraycopy(edges[k], z+1, ne, z, m-z);
				newedges[k] = ne;
			}//edgelist
		}
		return new Graph(newedges);
	}
}

Note the use of two statement labels, edgelist and search, and the use of break statements. This allows the code that copies a list, omitting one edge, to be shared between two separate tests, the test for an edge from node i to node j, and the test for an edge from node j to node i.