Branching Statements

Branching statements allow transferring control from one location to another within a method.

Exit and Return Statements

The Exit statement allows exiting a particular kind of statement block. The Exit keyword is followed by the kind of block to be exited: Sub , Function , Property , Try , Select , Do , While , or For . If there is no containing block of the type specified, the compiler will give an error. Note that the statement will exit the containing block of the type specified, including any blocks that may be nested within that containing block.

 For x As Integer = 1 To 10   Dim y As Integer = x   While y > 0     y -= 1     If y = 5 Then       Exit For     End If   End While Next x 

In this example, when the Exit For is reached, execution will leave both the While loop and the For loop.

The Return statement returns control from a subroutine or a function, just as an Exit Sub or Exit Function statement does. In a function, however, the Return statement must supply an argument. This argument is returned as the value of the function. For example, the following function adds two numbers together and returns the result.

 Function Add(ByVal x As Integer, ByVal y As Integer) As Integer   Return x + y End Function 

Goto Statement and Labels

The GoTo statement transfers control to a specified label. A label is a name at the beginning of a line, followed by a colon .

 Dim x, y As Integer x = FetchValue() If x < 0 Then Goto SkipDivision y = 1 \ x SkipDivision: Return y 

Compatibility

Numbers can also be used as labels, but this functionality is included for historical reasons and is not encouraged.

It is worth noting that whether a statement is a label or a method invocation may at times be ambiguous because they can look the same. Whenever there is any question, the statement is always assumed to be a label.

 MsgBox("hello") : MsgBox("world!")  ' Two method calls MsgBox:                             ' label 

As a matter of style and good programming, use of the GoTo statement should be avoided unless absolutely needed. There are also several situations in which a GoTo statement is not allowed.

• A GoTo cannot branch into a With statement from outside the statement.

• A GoTo cannot branch into a For or For Each statement from outside the statement.

• A GoTo cannot branch into a SyncLock statement from outside the statement.

• A GoTo can only branch from a Catch statement into the Try block of the same statement.

• A GoTo can never branch out of a Finally statement.

• A GoTo can never branch into a Catch or Finally statement.

The first two restrictions deal with statements that do initialization at the beginning of the block; if the initialization were skipped , statements within the block would not work properly. The rest of the restrictions have to do with the way that the .NET Runtime handles exceptions (the SyncLock statement contains an implicit Try...Catch statement).

Compatibility

The GoSub statement and the computed forms of the GoTo and GoSub statements ( On...GoTo and On...GoSub ) are no longer supported.