CODEWITHSUNDEEP
lua
André Luís
André Luís

Reputation: 141

Break while loop on Lua if condition is not met

I have this simple while loop. I'd like to make it break the loop when the conditional variable is changed. Instead, it's finishing the loop and only then breaking it.

a = true
while( a == true )
do
  center_general_medium:highlight(1)
  center_general_small:highlight(1)
  center_general_tiny:highlight(1)
  a = false << ------------------- should break loop here if, for some reason, "a" value is changed.
  center_general_medium:highlight(1)
  center_general_small:highlight(1)
  center_general_tiny:highlight(1)
end

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4450

Answers (1)

DarkWiiPlayer
DarkWiiPlayer

Reputation: 7046

Short answer: no, that's just not how loops work.

Long answer: Technically, you could do this with lots of magic, but it wouldn't look pretty. Coroutines and metamethods can take you a long way, if you're willing to put some work into it, but I don't think it's worth it in your example.

Looking at your problem, it's obvious that you actually have an inner and an outer loop; the outer one being the while loop, and the inner just looping over a few objects and calling :highlight(1) on them. So what you really want, is to break through two loops at once, which can't be done. Instead, you should write the inner loop as an actual loop, and break out of that when a == false, then let the outer loop stop because of the unmet condition.

local objects = {
   center_general_medium,
   center_general_small,
   center_general_tiny,
   center_general_medium,
   center_general_small,
   center_general_tiny
}

a = true

while a do
   for _, object in ipairs(objects) do
      object:highlight(1)
      if not a then break end
   end
end

Upvotes: 4

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