Groovy - how to exit each loop?

Question

I\'m new to Grails/Groovy and am trying to find a node in a an xml file; I\'ve figured out how to iterate over all of them, but I want to exit the loop when the target node is f

Answer 1

You cannot do it elegantly. You might see some people suggest throwing an Exception, but that's just plain ugly.

Here's some mailing list discussion on using each vs. for, and a couple people say that for is preferred because of each's inability to break from the iteration.

Your best bet is probably to change over to a for loop and iterate:

for(def domain : records.children()) { // this may need some tweaking depending on types
    // do stuff
    if(condition) {
        break;
    }
}

Either that, or like you said, maybe use find or findAll to find the element you're looking for (the following code is paraphrased, I don't have time yet to test it out):

def result = records.children().find { domain -> domain.@domain_name == targetDomain }
result.children().each {
    // print stuff
}

Related SO questions:

• best-pattern-for-simulating-continue-in-groovy-closure
• is-it-possible-to-break-out-of-closure-in-groovy