WHILE...WEND

The WHILE...WEND statement is used to repeat a block of statements while the condition is met.

Syntax

WHILE condition

.

.

.

WEND

Description

• condition is a numeric expression used to determine if the loop will execute.
• statements will execute repeatedly while condition is a non-zero value.
• EXIT WHILE can be used for emergency exits from the loop in QB64 only.
• A DO...LOOP can use the same DO WHILE condition to get the same results.
• WHILE loops only run if the WHILE condition is True.

Table 3: The relational operations for condition checking. In this table, A and B are the Expressions to compare. Both must represent the same general type, i.e. they must result into either numerical values or STRING values. If a test succeeds, then true (-1) is returned, false (0) if it fails, which both can be used in further Boolean evaluations. ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Relational Operations │ ├────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────┤ │ Operation │ Description │ Example usage │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A = B │ Tests if A is equal to B. │ IF A = B THEN │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A <> B │ Tests if A is not equal to B. │ IF A <> B THEN │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A < B │ Tests if A is less than B. │ IF A < B THEN │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A > B │ Tests if A is greater than B. │ IF A > B THEN │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A <= B │ Tests if A is less than or equal to B. │ IF A <= B THEN │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┤ │ A >= B │ Tests if A is greater than or equal to B. │ IF A >= B THEN │ └────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────┘ The operations should be very obvious for numerical values. For strings be aware that all checks are done case sensitive (i.e. "Foo" <> "foo"). The equal/not equal check is pretty much straight forward, but for the less/greater checks the ASCII value of the first different character is used for decision making: E.g. "abc" is less than "abd", because in the first difference (the 3rd character) the "c" has a lower ASCII value than the "d". This behavior may give you some subtle results, if you are not aware of the ASCII values and the written case: E.g. "abc" is greater than "abD", because the small letters have higher ASCII values than the capital letters, hence "c" > "D". You may use LCASE$ or UCASE$ to make sure both strings have the same case.

Examples

Example 1: Reading an entire file. Example assumes the program has a file opened as #1

OPEN "Readme.txt" FOR INPUT AS #1 WHILE NOT EOF(1) _LIMIT 1 'limit line prints to one per second LINE INPUT #1, text$ IF INKEY$ = CHR$(27) THEN EXIT WHILE 'ESC key exits PRINT text$ WEND

Example 2: Clearing the keyboard buffer.

WHILE INKEY$ <> "" : WEND

See also

• DO...LOOP
• FOR...NEXT
• UNTIL
• _CONTINUE

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