Continue vs Break in Python

Article 014

In today's article we will discuss about the functionality of 'continue' and 'break' statements inside a loop.

continue: This is used to skip a particular value inside a variable. A simple use-case of this is to extract information of all students inside a class except for those who are transferred. For transferred students, we could simply use 'continue'.

break: This is simply used to continue the loop until the desired set is extracted from the available dataset. A simple use-case of this is to get 1st 30 students from a class of 50 students.

Let's dive into a simple example for better understanding.

Suppose a class has 5 students Ram, Shyam, Geeta, Sita and Golu 
where Sita and Geeta are newly transferred students.

Now we can get a list of existing students by simply using continue.

Student = ['Ram', 'Shyam', 'Geeta', 'Sita', 'Golu']
for i in Student:
    if i == 'Sita' or i == 'Geeta':
        continue
    print(i)

Output is 
Ram
Shyam
Golu


Similarly we can get students names up to Geeta by simply using break.

Student = ['Ram', 'Shyam', 'Geeta', 'Sita', 'Golu']
for i in Student:
    if i =='Sita' :
        break
    print(i)

Output is 
Ram
Shyam
Geeta

Hope the above example is helpful in better understanding of 'break' and 'continue' statements in Python