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<h1>repeat</h1>
<p>The GameMaker Language has a number of ways that you can perform <i>loops</i>, ie: have a statement or statements iterate over itself a certain number of times. The simplest of these is the <tt>repeat</tt> statement, which has the form:</p>
<p class="code">repeat (<expression>)<br/> {<br/> <statement>;<br/> <statement>;<br/> ...<br/> }</p>
<p>With <tt>repeat</tt> the given <a class="tooltip" title="In programming, a statement is a single line of code written legally in a programming language that expresses an action to be carried out. A statement might have internal components of its own, including expressions, operators and functions. An example of a statement is A = B + 5. A GameMaker Studio 2 program is nothing but a sequence of one or more statements that together perform a task (like move the player). ">statement</a> is repeated the number of times indicated by the rounded value of the <a class="tooltip" title="An expression is a combination of one or more constants, variables, operators, and/or functions that are interpreted according to particular rules of precedence and association to return another value. A simple expression would be (5 + 5), which returns 10.">expression</a>. For
example, the following creates five balls at random positions:</p>
<p class="code">repeat (5)<br/> {
<br/> instance_create_layer(random(400), random(400), "Instances", obj_ball);<br/> }
</p>
<p>This can be very useful to avoid typing out the same code multiple times, or for using arrays, or for counting through a number of operations etc... You are not limited to using a single statement either, and can repeat multiple statements by enclosing
them within curly brackets <tt>{}</tt>. For example:</p>
<p class="code">var _x = 32;<br/> repeat (global.p_lives)<br/> {<br/> draw_sprite(spr_heart, 0, _x, 32);<br/> _x += sprite_get_width(spr_heart);<br/> }</p>
<p>The above example repeats the statements in the curly brackets for however many <a class="tooltip" title="An iteration is a single pass through a set of operations in your project code. One form of iteration in computer programming is via loops. A loop will repeat a certain segment of code until a condition is met and it can proceed further. Each time the computer runs a loop, it is known as an iteration. In simple terms, iteration is the process of repeating a particular snippet of code over and over again to perform a certain action.">iteration</a><span class="glossextra">s</span> the "lives" global variable has, and each iteration draws
the heart sprite at the <span class="inline">_x</span> position, then moves the position along a bit based on the heart sprite width.</p>
<p><strong>When should you use a <span class="inline">repeat</span> loop?</strong> Anytime that you want to repeat over one or more statements a fixed number of times without any specific need to maintain a count of the iterations.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that you can use the special <span class="inline"><a href="break.htm">break</a></span> and <span class="inline"><a href="continue.htm">continue</a></span> statements within a
<font face="Lucida Console"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><b>repeat</b></span></font> loop too. Using <span class="inline">break</span> will immediately exit the loop and move on to any code that is in the event or function after the loop should have finished, eg:</p>
<p class="code">var i = 0;<br/> var temp = 0;<br/> repeat (10)<br/> {<br/> temp += array[i];<br/> if (temp > max_total)<br/> {<br/> break;<br/> }<br/> else<br/> {<br/> i += 1;<br/> }<br/> }</p>
<p>The above code loops through 10 <a href="../Arrays.htm">array</a> values and adds them to a local variable. If the total of the local variable is greater than the given value for <span class="inline">max_total</span>, then the loop is terminated using
break, otherwise the loop will continue. </p>
<p>An example of using <span class="inline">continue</span> in a <span class="inline">repeat</span> loop would be:</p>
<p class="code">repeat(10)<br/> { <br/> var _x = random(room_width);<br/> var _y = random(room_height);<br/> if (instance_position(_x, y, obj_Enemy)<br/> {
<br/> continue;
<br/> }
<br/> instance_create_layer(_x, _y, "Instances", obj_Enemy);<br/> }</p>
<p>This code will repeat 10 times, generating a random room position then checking if an instance of the object <span class="inline">obj_Enemy</span> exists at that position. If it does, the current loop iteration is terminated using <span class="inline">continue</span> and a new iteration is started, and if it doesn't then an instance of the object <span class="inline">obj_Enemy</span> is created at the random position.</p>
<p>For more examples of loop functions please see the sections on <a href="while.htm"><tt>while</tt></a>, <a href="do___until.htm"><tt>do... until</tt></a>, and <a href="for.htm"><tt>for</tt></a>.</p>
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