Exiting Loops in Perl: last Instead of break

In Perl, if you’re looking to exit a loop prematurely, you might reach for a break statement similar to other programming languages. However, Perl does not use break. Instead, Perl provides the last statement to exit loop constructs.

Why Doesn’t break Work in Perl?

In Perl, break is not a recognized keyword for exiting loops. If you try to use break while use strict; is enabled, you’ll encounter an error because Perl interprets it as a bareword (an undeclared subroutine or variable). Here’s what typically goes wrong:

for my $entry (@array) {
    if ($entry eq "text") {
        break;  # Incorrect! Perl doesn't recognize 'break'
    }
}

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