Return Statements in Closures

I found an interesting little "quirk" that I was not expecting with Groovy today having to do with return statements in a closure.

Let's say I have some code like this:

String someMethod(){
 def myList = ["1", "a", "test", "z"]
 myList.each{
  println "in each loop for: " + it
  if(it == "test"){
   println "\tfound"
   return it
  }
  println "\tafter if"
 }
}

def value = someMethod()
println value;

The output is:

in each loop for: 1
 after if
in each loop for: a
 after if
in each loop for: test
 found
in each loop for: z
 after if
[1, a, test, z]

I was hoping for this:

in each loop for: 1
 after if
in each loop for: a
 after if
in each loop for: test
 found
test

Where it would return from the method once the value is found. It turns out each{} doesn't work this way. I am sure there are good (complicated) reasons for this, but for now I'm just going to change my method to use a good old for loop.

String someMethod2(){
 def myList = ["1", "a", "test", "z"]
 for(int i = 0; i < myList.size; i++){
  println "in each loop for: " + myList[i]
  if(myList[i] == "test"){
   println "\tfound"
   return myList[i]
  }
  println "\tafter if"
 }
}

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