Learning Programming Language

Welcome! In this section we going to cover the use of while loops in PHP.

Just like the for loop, while loop is used to execute a block of code for certain number of times until the condition in the while evaluate to true.

while(condition)
{
 //execute block of code
}

Example below prints integers through 1 to 5

<?php

$i = 1;
while ($i <= 5 )
{
 echo $i . "<br>";

 $i = $i + 1;
}

?>

In the above example, you see that the loop is run until the value of $i is less than or equal to 5 according to the condition in the loop. The $i = $i + 1; statement increments the value of $i by 1 on each iteration of our while loop.

Here is another example with decimal numbers.

Example below prints decimal numbers through 1.0 to 5.0

<?php

$i = 1.0;
while ($i <= 5.0 )
{
 printf("%.1f<br>", $i);

 $i = $i + 1.0;
}

?>

We can use the break; statement to stop the loop from executing.

Sometimes when we are working with loops, we want to break the loop when a certain condition is true.

For example, we might want to break our loop when $i reaches 4. Lets look at the example below.

<?php

$i = 1;
while ($i <= 5 )
{
 if($i == 4)
  break;

 echo $i . "<br>";

 $i = $i + 1;
}

?>

In the above example, we break the loop when $i reaches 4. The loop outputs...
1
2
3