how to stop a for loop

Question

I\'m writing a code to determine if every element in my nxn list is the same. i.e. [[0,0],[0,0]] returns true but [[0,1],[0,0]] will return false.

Answer 1

Use the break statement: http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#break

Answer 2

Use break and continue to do this. Breaking nested loops can be done in Python using the following:

for a in range(...):
   for b in range(..):
      if some condition:
         # break the inner loop
         break
   else:
      # will be called if the previous loop did not end with a `break` 
      continue
   # but here we end up right after breaking the inner loop, so we can
   # simply break the outer loop as well
   break

Another way is to wrap everything in a function and use return to escape from the loop.