Break statement with levels in PHP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Break Statement with Levels in PHP

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are managing a small library system. You want to check shelves and books to find a specific book. Once found, you want to stop checking further shelves and books immediately.

🎯 Goal: You will create nested loops to simulate shelves and books. Then, you will use the break statement with levels to stop the loops once the book is found.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create two nested for loops: outer loop for shelves (1 to 3), inner loop for books (1 to 5).

Create a variable targetBook with the value 3 to represent the book to find.

Use break 2; to exit both loops when the target book is found.

Print a message showing which shelf and book was found.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Nested loops and breaking out of them are common when searching through multi-level data like shelves and books, menus and submenus, or rows and columns.

💼 Career

Understanding how to control loops with break levels helps in writing efficient code for data processing, web scraping, and game development.

1

Create nested loops for shelves and books

Create a for loop with variable $shelf from 1 to 3 and inside it create another for loop with variable $book from 1 to 5.

PHP

<?php
for ($shelf = 1; $shelf <= 3; $shelf++) {
    for ($book = 1; $book <= 5; $book++) {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use two for loops, one inside the other, with the variables $shelf and $book.

2

Add a target book variable

Create a variable called $targetBook and set it to 3 before the loops.

PHP

<?php
$targetBook = 3;
for ($shelf = 1; $shelf <= 3; $shelf++) {
    for ($book = 1; $book <= 5; $book++) {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Define $targetBook before the loops to know which book to find.

3

Use break with levels to stop loops when book is found

Inside the inner loop, add an if statement to check if $book equals $targetBook. If yes, use break 2; to exit both loops.

PHP

<?php
$targetBook = 3;
for ($shelf = 1; $shelf <= 3; $shelf++) {
    for ($book = 1; $book <= 5; $book++) {
        if ($book == $targetBook) {
            // Your code here
        }
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use break 2; to stop both loops when the target book is found.

4

Print the shelf and book found

After the loops, write a print statement to display: "Found book $targetBook on shelf $shelf".

PHP

<?php
$targetBook = 3;
for ($shelf = 1; $shelf <= 3; $shelf++) {
    for ($book = 1; $book <= 5; $book++) {
        if ($book == $targetBook) {
            break 2;
        }
    }
}
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print to show the message with the variables $targetBook and $shelf.