In the cursor examples presented so far, the programming logic required to process the result set of a cursor includes a statement to open the cursor, a loop construct to retrieve each row of the result set, a test for the end of the result set, and a statement to close the cursor. The cursor FOR loop is a loop construct that eliminates the need to individually code the statements just listed.

The cursor FOR loop opens a previously declared cursor, fetches all rows in the cursor result set, and then closes the cursor.

The syntax for creating a cursor FOR loop is as follows:

FOR record IN cursor
LOOP
   statements
END LOOP;

record is an identifier assigned to an implicitly declared record with definition cursor%ROWTYPE. cursor is the name of a previously declared cursor. statements are one or more SPL statements. At least one statement must exist.

The following example shows the example from %NOTFOUND that is modified to use a cursor FOR loop:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE cursor_example
IS
    CURSOR emp_cur_1 IS SELECT * FROM emp;
BEGIN
    DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('EMPNO    ENAME');
    DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('-----    -------');
    FOR v_emp_rec IN emp_cur_1 LOOP
        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(v_emp_rec.empno || '     ' || v_emp_rec.ename);
    END LOOP;
END;

The same results are achieved as shown in the following output:

EXEC cursor_example;

EMPNO    ENAME
-----    -------
7369     SMITH
7499     ALLEN
7521     WARD
7566     JONES
7654     MARTIN
7698     BLAKE
7782     CLARK
7788     SCOTT
7839     KING
7844     TURNER
7876     ADAMS
7900     JAMES
7902     FORD
7934     MILLER