break-out-of-a-while-loop.md

Break Out Of A While Loop

The while construct is a great way to loop indefinitely. You may eventually want to break out of the loop. For that, you are going to need to invalidate the while condition. One way of going about this is creating a mutable ref, changing it from true to false when a certain condition is met.

let break = ref(true);

while (break^) {
    switch (Unix.readdir(currentDir)) {
    | exception End_of_file => break := false
    | item => print_endline(item);
    }
};

Here we have a mutable ref called break which starts as true. This is our while condition. Its actual value can be referenced by appending the ^ character -- hence break^. Once a certain condition is met inside our while block, we can set break to false using the := operator.

The above code snippet can be seen in full details here.

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