Infinite loops

We all know what a loop is: a programming language statement that allows us to repeat the execution of a piece of code until a certain ending condition is met. If the ending condition is never met or it does not exist at all, the loop never ends: that’s an infinite loop (also known as an endless loop).

To willingly produce an infinite loop in PHP you can use a while statement with true or 1 instead of the ending condition:

while (true)
	{
	}

or an empty for statement:

for (;;)
	{
	}

When in need of very long loops we sometime use infinite loops in our code but more frequently we use pseudo-infinite loops, which are loops that appear to be infinite but eventually end sometime:

while (true)
	{
	//some code
	if (date('m-d')>'12-25')
		break;
	}
//appears to be infinite but force ends on Christmas :)

Tip: you may find force ending conditions very useful when debugging code.