I am trying to understand use cases for each type of loop. I was recently working on the Profile Lookup challenge, and had everything correct, but was using a While loop. The While loop got me an answer of “No such contact” everytime - the basic catch-all return value at the end of the function - no matter what variables where fed in. When I went to research, I found that the answer involved a for loop. So, I switched my while loop to a for loop and it worked. Without picking apart the program, I would like to know if there are specific use cases for each, as they seem like very similar looping to me (though a for loop seems to be more efficient).
I guess I am asking if there’s a fundamental difference between the loops that would cause someone to use one over the other in different situations.
Thank you so much to this community! I couldn’t do this without you!
Usually, for loops are used when you know how many iterations you need to do, example: a fixed number, size of a list or array, length of a string.
While loops are usually used when you don’t know beforehand how many times you need to loop/process something, but you know the condition when your loop should end, for example: end of file condition, end of records dataset, a match is found, a condition is true (or not true).
They’re semantically identical, but people tend to use them as owel explained. Sometimes you just don’t need to know the loop iteration index, so a while loop is cleaner.
These two basic uses are identical:
for (let i=0; i < somelimit; i++) { console.log(i); }
let i=0;
while (i < somelimit) { console.log(i); i++; }
So in your example you hadn’t just changed the looping variant, you also changed the logic.
So, those two are essentially the same, it’s just that one is typically used when you don’t have a known number of iterations. So, somehow my while loop was logically different than what my for loop ended up being. Seems like the logic is clearer in a for loop (all in one line). I am guessing that my positioning of the i++ statement was probably in the wrong place (once I get to about 4-5 closing brackets in a row I tend to get lost as to which bracket goes where). I probably should have copied it from FCC to something like Atom so that I can see the brackets better.
Thank you so much for the help! It’s clearer now what happened when I changed to the for loop.
You will almost always use for loops. I find it to be very rare that you would need/want to use a while loop. One example of a good use of a while loop is when making games.