How to break out of multiple loops?

Question

Given the following code (that doesn\'t work):

while True:
    #snip: print out current state
    while True:
        ok = get_input(\"Is this ok? (y/n)\")
          


        

Answer 1

I tend to agree that refactoring into a function is usually the best approach for this sort of situation, but for when you really need to break out of nested loops, here's an interesting variant of the exception-raising approach that @S.Lott described. It uses Python's with statement to make the exception raising look a bit nicer. Define a new context manager (you only have to do this once) with:

from contextlib import contextmanager
@contextmanager
def nested_break():
    class NestedBreakException(Exception):
        pass
    try:
        yield NestedBreakException
    except NestedBreakException:
        pass

Now you can use this context manager as follows:

with nested_break() as mylabel:
    while True:
        print "current state"
        while True:
            ok = raw_input("Is this ok? (y/n)")
            if ok == "y" or ok == "Y": raise mylabel
            if ok == "n" or ok == "N": break
        print "more processing"

Advantages: (1) it's slightly cleaner (no explicit try-except block), and (2) you get a custom-built Exception subclass for each use of nested_break; no need to declare your own Exception subclass each time.