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

a little bit of silly self-documenting:

int i, j, k;
int done = 0;

for (i = 0; i < 100 && ! done; i++) {
    for (j = 0; j < 100 && ! done; j++) {
        for (k = 0; k < 100 && ! done; k++) {
            if (k == 50) we_are(done);
        }
    }
}

//...

void we_are(int *done) {
    *done = 1;
}

but really, you shouldn't have three nested for-loops. You should consider refactoring into different functions and improving your program's logic instead of doing this.

While I agree that sometimes goto really is the best solution, I think that any problem to which goto is the solution is a result of poor code.