EXIT

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Immediately terminates the current loop. Execution continues with the statement after the loop.

Syntax

EXIT

Description

Normally, all of the statements in the loop are executed in each iteration of the loop; in other words, the loop always exits after the last statement in the loop. Use EXIT to exit a loop from the middle of a loop, due to some extra or abnormal condition.

In most cases, you don’t have to resort to using EXIT; you can code the condition that controls the loop to handle the extra condition. The condition is tested between loop iterations, after the last statement, but that usually means that there are some statements that should not be executed because of this condition. Those statements would have to be conditionalized out with an IF statement. Therefore, often it’s simpler to EXIT out of a loop immediately once the condition occurs.