Break and Continue

You have now learned about the two fundamental ways of repeatedly executing a block of code.

1. for loops
2. while loops

• A for loop will repeatedly execute a block of code based on the length of the iterable.
• A while loop will repeatedly execute a block of code until its condition stops being met.

In the case of a for loop, what if you wanted to break the loop before it iterated through the entire length of the iterable? Also, what if you wanted to skip over a specific iteration? That is where the break and continue keywords come into play!

In this article, you're going to use the break and continue keywords to modify the behaviour of a for loop.

Continue

The continue keyword jumps over one iteration of the loop based on a condition.

You will iterate through a list of numbers that range from 0-9

numbers = list(range(0,10))
print(numbers)

>>[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

If you want to print only even numbers to the console, you can use the continue keyword to skip over an iteration where the number is odd.

for number in numbers:
	if number % 2 != 0:
		continue
	print(number)

>>0

>>2

>>4

>>6

>>8

When you place a modulo % in between two numbers, it calculates the remainder of the first number divided by the second number. If the remainder is not equal to zero (!=)means not equal, then the number is odd. In which case, the iteration must be skipped using the continue keyword . This results in only even numbers being printed.

Break

What if you replaced the continue keyword with break?

for number in numbers:
	if number % 2 != 0:
		break
	print(number)

>>0

The break keyword, unlike continue, completely breaks out of the loop when executed.

‍This is all you need to know for loops! In the past two sections, you learned how to control the execution of your code through if-elif-else statements and loops. Now that you know all about control flow with Python, the next section is entirely focused on organizing your code into functions.

See you there!