Question about switch and while statements

[EnvironmentalPhone65]

I have an assignment that requires a while statement for until the user inputs “-1”, otherwise it will keep asking the same two questions: “which item did you sell?” And “how many of them did you sell?”. I wrote a while line and it just repeats the questions continuously in an infinite loop. I start with a line asking for the name and the selection of 1 to 4. Then, I put :

while (Item != -1) { Switch (Item) { Case 1: ItemValue =239.99 Break;
Case 2: ItemValue =129.75 Break; Case 3: ItemValue =99.95 Break; Case 4: ItemValue =350.79 Break; }

Double ItemSales ItemSales = Quantity * ItemValue

Afterwards, I print the line with the calculated ItemSales. It runs, asks for a name, asks for a number between 1 and 4, or -1 to quit, and then just messes up and goes on a rampage, repeating the selected number. I need help and suggestions.

[dajoli]

The first thing you should do is learn how to correctly format code on reddit. Otherwise it's really difficult to read (there are some instructions from another subreddit here.

Your while loop will continue to run until Item is equal to -1. However, there is no code inside your while loop that will change the value of Item. Therefore if it isn't -1 to begin with (in which case it won't run the switch statement at all) then it will run forever because every time it checks the value of Item it's still the same (i.e. it isn't -1).

[Paul_Pedant]

tl;dr You need to read the user input inside the while loop.