Bad practice? Leaving out for loop condition

Question

I am working on a chess game and right now I am making a method to check from the king, in a direction and returns true if a threat is found, false if no threat is found. This method takes in two ints to increase x and y by. And this method will from the starting location, in the direction given ( (1,0) for up, (1,1) for up&right, (0,1) for down).

My problem is, this method checks the path with a for loop, which will eventually hit the border of the chess game, and find a barrier, or it will find a piece. Either way, that is how the for loop should end. But then what condition would go in the for loop? I feel like it might be bad practice to just leave it out, but then the only logical condition would be to make sure x and y are both in the range of 1-8. But that would leave the code looking like : for(int i = begx + xdiff, j = begy + ydiff; (i < 8 && i > 1) && (j < 8 && j > 1); i += xdiff, j += ydiff) { .. }

This would be the only other option I see, and this in itself seems like bad practice to me also. Because, it looks over complicated and crammed together. And this condition should never be broken, so why would I have it in there if it would never be the reason the loop broke? I don't want other programmers to read my code and think this might be something they have to look out for, when really, I just didn't need a condition there and put it in for double checking.

This is the whole method, for reference:

public boolean incheckPath(Location l1, int xdiff, int ydiff) {
    int begx = l1.getX();
    int begy = l1.getY();

    String team = board[begx][begy].getTeam();

    for(int i = begx + xdiff, j = begy + ydiff; ; i += xdiff, j += ydiff) {
        if(board[i][j].getType() != ' ') {

            if(board[i][j].getType() == '#') {
                return false;
            }
            if(board[i][j].getTeam().equals(team)) {
                return false;
            }
            if(board[i][j].getType() == 'Q' || board[i][j].getType() == 'R') {
                return true;
            }

        }
    }

}

EDIT It has been improved to implement a while loop, but now how could this be improved any? Someone suggested using break and continue so I implemented that where I saw it could be. But, someone said I shouldn't return in a loop. Without making a variable to hold the return value, how would this be possible?

public boolean incheckPath(Location l1, int xdiff, int ydiff) {
    int x = l1.getX();
    int y = l1.getY();

    String team = board[x][y].getTeam();

    while(true) {
        x += xdiff;
        y += ydiff;

        if(board[x][y].getType() == '#' || board[x][y].getTeam().equals(team)) {
            break;
        }

        if(board[x][y].getType() == 'Q' || board[x][y].getType() == 'R') {
            return true;
        }

    }

    return false;

}

Answer 1

What you want to do is more readable as a while loop:

    int i = begx + xdiff;
    int j = begy + ydiff;
    while (true) {
        if(board[i][j].getType() != ' ') {
            if(board[i][j].getType() == '#') {
                return false;
            }
            if(board[i][j].getTeam().equals(team)) {
                return false;
            }
            if(board[i][j].getType() == 'Q' || board[i][j].getType() == 'R') {
                return true;
            }
        }
        i += xdiff; 
        j += ydiff;
    }