You can only support continue cleanly, not break. Especially with stuff like eachLine and each. The inability to support break has to do with how those methods are evaluated, there is no consideration taken for not finishing the loop that can be communicated to the method. Here's how to support continue --
Best approach (assuming you don't need the resulting value).
revs.eachLine { line ->
if (line ==~ /-{28}/) {
return // returns from the closure
}
}
If your sample really is that simple, this is good for readability.
revs.eachLine { line ->
if (!(line ==~ /-{28}/)) {
// do what you would normally do
}
}
another option, simulates what a continue would normally do at a bytecode level.
revs.eachLine { line ->
while (true) {
if (line ==~ /-{28}/) {
break
}
// rest of normal code
break
}
}
One possible way to support break is via exceptions:
try {
revs.eachLine { line ->
if (line ==~ /-{28}/) {
throw new Exception("Break")
}
}
} catch (Exception e) { } // just drop the exception
You may want to use a custom exception type to avoid masking other real exceptions, especially if you have other processing going on in that class that could throw real exceptions, like NumberFormatExceptions or IOExceptions.
I think you want to use find instead of each (at least for the specified example). Closures don't directly support break.
Under the covers, groovy doesn't actually use a closure either for find, it uses a for loop.
Alternatively, you could write your own enhanced version of find/each iterator that takes a conditional test closure, and another closure to call if a match is found, having it break if a match is met.
Here's an example:
Object.metaClass.eachBreak = { ifClosure, workClosure ->
for (Iterator iter = delegate.iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
def value = iter.next()
if (ifClosure.call(value)) {
workClosure.call(value)
break
}
}
}
def a = ["foo", "bar", "baz", "qux"]
a.eachBreak( { it.startsWith("b") } ) {
println "working on $it"
}
// prints "working on bar"
Best Answer
Nope, you can't abort an "each" without throwing an exception. You likely want a classic loop if you want the break to abort under a particular condition.
Alternatively, you could use a "find" closure instead of an each and return true when you would have done a break.
This example will abort before processing the whole list:
Prints
but doesn't print 6 or 7.
It's also really easy to write your own iterator methods with custom break behavior that accept closures:
Also prints: