Is it bad practice to use break to exit a loop in Java? [closed]

Good lord no. Sometimes there is a possibility that something can occur in the loop that satisfies the overall requirement, without satisfying the logical loop condition. In that case, break is used, to stop you cycling around a loop pointlessly.

Example

String item;

for(int x = 0; x < 10; x++)
{
    // Linear search.
    if(array[x].equals("Item I am looking for"))
    {
       //you've found the item. Let's stop.
       item = array[x];
       break; 
    }
}

What makes more sense in this example. Continue looping to 10 every time, even after you've found it, or loop until you find the item and stop? Or to put it into real world terms; when you find your keys, do you keep looking?

Edit in response to comment

Why not set x to 11 to break the loop? It's pointless. We've got break! Unless your code is making the assumption that x is definitely larger than 10 later on (and it probably shouldn't be) then you're fine just using break.

Edit for the sake of completeness

There are definitely other ways to simulate break. For example, adding extra logic to your termination condition in your loop. Saying that it is either loop pointlessly or use break isn't fair. As pointed out, a while loop can often achieve similar functionality. For example, following the above example..

while(x < 10 && item == null)
{
    if(array[x].equals("Item I am looking for"))
    {
        item = array[x];
    }

    x++;
}

Using break simply means you can achieve this functionality with a for loop. It also means you don't have to keep adding in conditions into your termination logic, whenever you want the loop to behave differently. For example.

for(int x = 0; x < 10; x++)
{
   if(array[x].equals("Something that will make me want to cancel"))
   {
       break;
   }
   else if(array[x].equals("Something else that will make me want to cancel"))
   {
       break;
   }
   else if(array[x].equals("This is what I want"))
   {
       item = array[x];
   }
}

Rather than a while loop with a termination condition that looks like this:

while(x < 10 && !array[x].equals("Something that will make me want to cancel") && 
                !array[x].equals("Something else that will make me want to cancel"))

Using break, just as practically any other language feature, can be a bad practice, within a specific context, where you are clearly misusing it. But some very important idioms cannot be coded without it, or at least would result in far less readable code. In those cases, break is the way to go.

In other words, don't listen to any blanket, unqualified advice—about break or anything else. It is not once that I've seen code totally emaciated just to literally enforce a "good practice".

Regarding your concern about performance overhead, there is absolutely none. At the bytecode level there are no explicit loop constructs anyway: all flow control is implemented in terms of conditional jumps.

The JLS specifies a break is an abnormal termination of a loop. However, just because it is considered abnormal does not mean that it is not used in many different code examples, projects, products, space shuttles, etc. The JVM specification does not state either an existence or absence of a performance loss, though it is clear code execution will continue after the loop.

However, code readability can suffer with odd breaks. If you're sticking a break in a complex if statement surrounded by side effects and odd cleanup code, with possibly a multilevel break with a label(or worse, with a strange set of exit conditions one after the other), it's not going to be easy to read for anyone.

If you want to break your loop by forcing the iteration variable to be outside the iteration range, or by otherwise introducing a not-necessarily-direct way of exiting, it's less readable than break.

However, looping extra times in an empty manner is almost always bad practice as it takes extra iterations and may be unclear.

In my opinion a For loop should be used when a fixed amount of iterations will be done and they won't be stopped before every iteration has been completed. In the other case where you want to quit earlier I prefer to use a While loop. Even if you read those two little words it seems more logical. Some examples:

for (int i=0;i<10;i++) {
    System.out.println(i);
}

When I read this code quickly I will know for sure it will print out 10 lines and then go on.

for (int i=0;i<10;i++) {
    if (someCondition) break;
    System.out.println(i);
}

This one is already less clear to me. Why would you first state you will take 10 iterations, but then inside the loop add some extra conditions to stop sooner?

I prefer the previous example written in this way (even when it's a little more verbose, but that's only with 1 line more):

int i=0;
while (i<10 && !someCondition) {
    System.out.println(i);
    i++;
}

Everyone who will read this code will see immediatly that there is an extra condition that might terminate the loop earlier.

Ofcourse in very small loops you can always discuss that every programmer will notice the break statement. But I can tell from my own experience that in larger loops those breaks can be overseen. (And that brings us to another topic to start splitting up code in smaller chunks)