Ruby – How to break out from a ruby block

ruby

Here is Bar#do_things:

class Bar   
  def do_things
    Foo.some_method(x) do |x|
      y = x.do_something
      return y_is_bad if y.bad? # how do i tell it to stop and return do_things? 
      y.do_something_else
    end
    keep_doing_more_things
  end
end

And here is Foo#some_method:

class Foo
  def self.some_method(targets, &block)
    targets.each do |target|
      begin
        r = yield(target)
      rescue 
        failed << target
      end
    end
  end
end

I thought about using raise, but I am trying to make it generic, so I don't want to put anything any specific in Foo.

Best Answer

Use the keyword next. If you do not want to continue to the next item, use break.

When next is used within a block, it causes the block to exit immediately, returning control to the iterator method, which may then begin a new iteration by invoking the block again:

f.each do |line|              # Iterate over the lines in file f
  next if line[0,1] == "#"    # If this line is a comment, go to the next
  puts eval(line)
end

When used in a block, break transfers control out of the block, out of the iterator that invoked the block, and to the first expression following the invocation of the iterator:

f.each do |line|             # Iterate over the lines in file f
  break if line == "quit\n"  # If this break statement is executed...
  puts eval(line)
end
puts "Good bye"              # ...then control is transferred here

And finally, the usage of return in a block:

return always causes the enclosing method to return, regardless of how deeply nested within blocks it is (except in the case of lambdas):

def find(array, target)
  array.each_with_index do |element,index|
    return index if (element == target)  # return from find
  end
  nil  # If we didn't find the element, return nil
end