When using loops, sometimes we want to skip one of the execution in between depending on certain condition or we may want to stop further execution when certain condition meets on top of terminating condition. This is where continue and break statements come in handy.
Break Statement
In Python, break statement can be useful to break an iteration on specific condition. This can be useful for prematurely ending loops. For example, I am collecting user input and as soon as a user enters ‘q’ or ‘quit’, I want the code to exit otherwise continue prompting user for more input. In that case, we can make use of break statement. Break statement will break out the of the loop. Let’s see how to implement that.
1while True:
2 user_input = input("Can you guess the word?: ")
3 if user_input == "q" or user_input == "quit":
4 print("You guessed it right!")
5 print("Good bye")
6 break
7 else:
8 print("No, that's not what I thought. Guess again!")
In this code, we prompt user for guessing a word. If user enters anything other than q or quit, the code continues prompting the user. When user enter quit, the code exits.
Output
Can you guess the word?: someword
No, that's not what I thought. Guess again!
Can you guess the word?: somethingelse
No, that's not what I thought. Guess again!
Can you guess the word?: quit
You guessed it right!
Good bye
Continue Statement
Similar to break statement, if we’re writing a code and want to skip only few iterations of a loop, in those cases we can use continue statement to skip on certain condition using if clause. For example, in below code, I want to print all numbers up to 10, but I want to skip only 5 and 7, then we can use for loop to print numbers. However, to skip 5 and 7, we can use continue statement. It will skip that iteration and continue with the next one.
1for i in range(10):
2 if i == 5 or i == 7:
3 continue
4 print(i)
Output
0
1
2
3
4
6
8
9
Comments