Loop Control (break & continue)

Taking the wheel

Usually, a loop runs until it reaches the end of its collection or its condition becomes false.

But sometimes, you need to intervene. Maybe you found the exact item you were searching for, or maybe you encountered data you want to skip.

Python provides two powerful keywords to control the flow of loops: break and continue.

The break keyword

break acts like an emergency exit. The moment Python hits a break statement, the loop instantly stops, and the program moves on to the code after the loop.

python
for number in range(1, 100):
    print(f"Searching... currently at {number}")
    if number == 5:
        print("Found the target! Stopping the search.")
        break  # <--- Emergency exit!

print("Loop has finished.")

Even though the loop was scheduled to run 99 times, it stops completely the moment condition == 5 is met because of the break statement.

The continue keyword

continue is like a "skip" button. Instead of destroying the entire loop like break, continue just skips the rest of the current iteration and immediately jumps back to the top of the loop for the next item.

python
for i in range(1, 6):
    if i == 3:
        print("Skipping number 3...")
        continue  # <--- Jump back to the top!
        
    print(f"Processing number {i}")

Output:

Processing number 1
Processing number 2
Skipping number 3...
Processing number 4
Processing number 5

Notice how "Processing number 3" never prints. The continue statement forced Python to ignore the rest of the code block for that specific cycle.

Infinite loops and break

A very common pattern in Python is to intentionally write an infinite loop using while True:, and then use a break statement when the user inputs a specific command to quit.

python
while True:
    command = input("Type 'q' to quit: ")
    if command == 'q':
        print("Goodbye!")
        break
    print("Keep going...")

What this lesson should give you

After this lesson, you should understand how to:

• use break to completely escape and terminate a loop early
• use continue to skip the rest of the current iteration and move to the next one
• combine while True: and break to create controllable interactive loops