Giving name to a loop

Question

While browsing questions and answers in this forum i found a piece of code were names were given to loops in order to use them for break. Like

nameofloop:
    for(){
        for(){
             if(){ break nameofloop;}
        }
    }

Im new to programming and i havent seen that before. My question is what other uses of naming loops are there?

Answer 1

This is not a labeled loop, is just a label that you place anywhere and then you can "break" or "continue" to depending on your conditions. You can also use in a nested if-else with for loopings in order to break several loops decorated with if-else, so you can avoid setting lot of flags and testing them in the if-else in order to continue or not in this nested level.

Its use is discouraged as resembles a goto and causes spaghetti-code.

Personally I used only once, time ago, in order to break a for loop inside other two for loops with if-else and continue in the outer loop, as break inside a loop breaks this loop, but you continue in the outer loop, not the most-outer that was my case.

Answer 2

You can also say:

continue nameofloop;

...to jump to start of the named loop. I don't think there are any other use cases for labels in Java.