How to break from nested loops in Ruby?

assume the following ruby code:

bank.branches do |branch|
  branch.employees.each do |employee|
    NEXT BRANCH if employee.name = "John Doe"
  end
end

NEXT BRANCH is of course pseudocode. is there a way that i can break out of a parent loop, the way one can do so in Perl, for example (by employing loop labels)?

thanks in advance.

Catch and throw might be what you are looking for:

bank.branches do |branch|
  catch :missingyear do  #:missingyear acts as a label
    branch.employees.each do |employee|
      (2000..2011).each do |year|
        throw :missingyear unless something  #break out of two loops
      end
    end
  end #You end up here if :missingyear is thrown
end

There's no built-in way to break out of containing blocks without their consent. You'll just have to do something like:

bank.branches do |branch|
  break unless branch.employees.each do |employee|
    break if employee.name == "John Doe"
  end
end

while c1
 while c2
    # execute code
    do_break = true if need_to_break_out_of_parent_loop
 end
 break if do_break
end

My impulse would be to move the nested blocks into a method, with a return in place of the break.

def find_branch_and_employee_by_name(bank,emp_name)
  bank.branches.each do |branch|
    branch.employees.each do |employee|
      return([branch,employee]) if employee.name == emp_name
    end
  end
  nil   # employee wasn't found
end