A common question is, how do I break out of two nested loops at once? For example, how can I examine pairs of characters in a string, stopping when I find an equal pair? The classic way to do this is to write two nested loops that iterate over the indexes of the string:

s = "a string to examine"
for i in range(len(s)):
    for j in range(i+1, len(s)):
        if s[i] == s[j]:
            answer = (i, j)
            break   # How to break twice???

Here we are using two loops to generate the two indexes that we want to examine. When we find the condition we’re looking for, we want to end both loops.

There are a few common answers to this. But I don’t like them much:

• Put the loops into a function, and return from the function to break the loops. This is unsatisfying because the loops might not be a natural place to refactor into a new function, and maybe you need access to other locals during the loops.
• Raise an exception and catch it outside the double loop. This is using exceptions as a form of goto. There’s no exceptional condition here, you’re just taking advantage of exceptions’ action at a distance.
• Use boolean variables to note that the loop is done, and check the variable in the outer loop to execute a second break. This is a low-tech solution, and may be right for some cases, but is mostly just extra noise and bookkeeping.

My preferred answer, and one that I covered in my PyCon 2013 talk, Loop Like A Native, is to make the double loop into a single loop, and then just use a simple break.

This requires putting a little more work into the loops, but is a good exercise in abstracting your iteration. This is something Python is very good at, but it is easy to use Python as if it were a less capable language, and not take advantage of the loop abstractions available.

Let’s consider the problem again. Is this really two loops? Before you write any code, listen to the English description again:

How can I examine pairs of characters in a string, stopping when I find an equal pair?

I don’t hear two loops in that description. There’s a single loop, over pairs. So let’s write it that way:

def unique_pairs(n):
    """Produce pairs of indexes in range(n)"""
    for i in range(n):
        for j in range(i+1, n):
            yield i, j

s = "a string to examine"
for i, j in unique_pairs(len(s)):
    if s[i] == s[j]:
        answer = (i, j)
        break

Here we’ve written a generator to produce the pairs of indexes we need. Now our loop is a single loop over pairs, rather than a double loop over indexes. The double loop is still there, but abstracted away inside the unique_pairs generator.

This makes our code nicely match our English. And notice we no longer have to write len(s) twice, another sign that the original code wanted refactoring. The unique_pairs generator can be reused if we find other places we want to iterate like this, though remember that multiple uses is not a requirement for writing a function.

I know this technique seems exotic. But it really is the best solution. If you still feel tied to the double loops, think more about how you imagine the structure of your program. The very fact that you are trying to break out of both loops at once means that in some sense they are one thing, not two. Hide the two-ness inside one generator, and you can structure your code the way you really think about it.

Python has powerful tools for abstraction, including generators and other techniques for abstracting iteration. My Loop Like A Native talk has more detail (and one egregious joke) if you want to hear more about it.