Nested Loops – Concepts

A nested loop is a construction where in the body of one loop (outer one) stays another loop (inner one). In each iteration of the outer loop, the whole inner loop is executed. This happens in the following way:

• When nested loops start executing, the outer loop starts first: the controlling variable is initialized and after a check for ending the loop the code in its body is executed.
• After that, the inner loop is executed. The controlling variables start position is initialized, a check for ending the loop is made and the code in its body is executed.
• When reaching the specified value for ending the loop, the program goes back one step up and continues executing the previous (outer) loop. The controlling variable of the outer loop changes with one step, a check is made to see if the condition for ending the loop is met and a new execution of the nested (inner) loop is started.
• This is repeated until the variable of the outer loop meets the condition to end the loop.

Video: Nested Loops

Watch this video to learn the concepts of nested loops: https://youtu.be/Sj49u6XlzXU.

Nested Loops – Examples

Here is an example that illustrates nested loops. The aim is again to print a rectangle made of n * n stars, in which for each row a loop iterates from 1 to n, and for each column a nested loop is executed from 1 to *n:

If we enter 5 as input on the console, the above sample code will print the following output:

Let's look at the example above. After initializing the first (outer) loop, its body, which contains the second (nested) loop starts executing. By itself it prints on one row n number of stars. After the inner loop finishes executing at the first iteration of the outer one, the first loop will continue, i.e. it will print an empty row on the console. After that, the variable of the first loop will be renewed and the whole second loop will be executed again. The inner loop will execute as many times as the body of the outer loop executes, in this case n times.