The goto Statement in JavaScript

JavaScript doesn’t have any goto keyword or method which can directly implement the goto method. Reason being that it is in an unstructured manner, and goto statement makes it hard to understand, and maintaining it is also tricky.

Still, we can use other ways to use the goto statement indirectly in our code. We will discuss these methods in this tutorial.

The break and continue keywords can be utilized to imitate the goto statement in JavaScript. The advantage of using these two methods is that it doesn’t have drawbacks like goto.

The goto keyword takes us to the user’s location if the conditions are True. The break and continue keywords together work as the goto statement. The continue statement will force the next iteration, and the break statement will force the control out of the loop.

Let’s see an example of break and continue. Suppose we want to print some numbers that the user wants. We will be printing only the numbers that the user wants to display as the output here. Let’s say we take a variable x and a loop for printing the required numbers.

See the code below.

var x;
for (x = 1; x <= 5; x++) {
  if (x === 4 || x === 2) {
    continue;
  }
  console.log(x);
  if (x === 5) {
    break;
  }
}

Output:

1
3
5

In the above example, we shifted the control of the program using the break and continue statements. Whenever 2 and 4 are encountered, we force the next iteration using the continue keyword. We break out the loop when it reaches a value of 5 using the break keyword.

Similarly, we can use these keywords in other ways to emulate the goto statement in JavaScript and shift the control of the program.