What is a neat way of breaking out of many for loops at once?

Question

Suppose I need to break out of three or four nested for loops at once at the occurence of some event inside the innermost loop. What is a neat way of doing that?

Answer 1

I'd do something like:

  int i, j, k;

  for (i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
      for (j = 0; j < 100; j++) {
          for (k = 0; k < 100; k++) {
              if (k == 50) {
                  return;
              }
          }
      }
  }

Answer 2

How would you accomplish the same thing? (w/o using jumps)

Why? Nothing is universally evil, and every put-upon tool has its uses (except gets()). Using goto here makes your code look cleaner, and is one of the only choices we have (assuming C). Look:

int i, j, k;

for (i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    for (j = 0; j < 100; j++) {
        for (k = 0; k < 100; k++) {
            if (k == 50) {
                goto END;
            }
        }
    }
}
END:

Much cleaner than all those flag variables, and it even shows more clearly what your code is doing.