In loops, you’ll sometimes encounter the continue and break statements. What do these statements mean and when do we use them?

These statements are used to help control the behavior of the loop iteration. They’re commonly used when we are looking to satisfy a condition, such as identifying the first instance of a certain value.

TL;DR, here’s the difference:

» break is a statement that allows us to exit out of the loop early.
» continue is a statement that lets us skip to the next iteration of the loop.

The big question you should have in mind for this: Do I care about the next iteration in this loop?

If the answer is yes, then you’d likely want to use continue. If not, then use break.

Let’s look at the behavior differences with some code snippets. Here, I’ll instantiate a list of 1 to 5 and see if the number is 3. Each iteration, we’ll let the user know whether if the number is 3 or not.

First, let’s look at the behavior of when we use continue:

my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

for number in my_list:
    if number == 3:
        print(f"Number found: {number}")
        continue
    
    print(f"Number not found (current: {number})")

print("Loop completed!")

When this code is ran, we’ll get the following output:

Number not found (current: 1)
Number not found (current: 2)
Number found: 3
Number not found (current: 4)
Number not found (current: 5)
Loop completed!

But if we use break instead of continue in the code snippet above, we’ll get the following output:

Number not found (current: 1)
Number not found (current: 2)
Number found: 3
Loop completed!

Notice that the number 4 and 5 weren’t printed: this is because we exited out of the loop early.

Give this week’s challenge a shot if you think you understand. Instead of code writing, see if you can explain what is going on:

def break_or_continue(numbers):
  for i, number in enumerate(numbers):
    if number % 3 == 0:
      continue
    elif i % number == 0:
      break
   
   print(number)

Explain how the following output happens when the function is called with the following list:

>>> break_or_continue([15, 22, 29, 3, 18, 9, 27, 11, 14])
22
29
11
14

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