How to Break and Continue in Nested Loops in JavaScript

The easiest way to break out of nested loops in JavaScript is to use labels. By labeling a loop, you can use it in a break statement to break out of not only the loop you’re in but also all the way out of the specified loop.

You can try out the examples in this post for yourself with this Replit.

const chunks = [
    [1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6],
    [7, 8, 9]
];

chunkLoop: for (const chunk of chunks) {
    for (const number of chunk) {
        if (number === 5) {
            break chunkLoop;
        }

        console.log(number);
    }
}

/*
Output:
1
2
3
4
*/

The output stops at 4 because when the code reaches 5, the code breaks all the way out of the outer loop (chunkLoop).

Continue

You can also use continue with a label if you want to skip to the next iteration of an outer loop.

const chunks = [
    [1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6],
    [7, 8, 9]
];

chunkLoop: for (const chunk of chunks) {
    for (const number of chunk) {
        if (number === 5) {
            continue chunkLoop;
        }

        console.log(number);
    }
}

/*
Output:
1
2
3
4
7
8
9
*/

5 and 6 aren’t in the output because when the code reaches 5, the code continues on to the next iteration of the chunk loop, which is the [7, 8, 9] chunk.