break & continue

Two keywords steer a loop from the inside:

continue skips the rest of this iteration and jumps to the next one
break leaves the loop completely

for n in range(10):
    if n == 2:
        continue   # skip 2
    if n == 5:
        break      # stop at 5
    print(n)       # 0 1 3 4

The extra practice uses lists: square brackets hold values in order, and [] is an empty list. A for loop can read those values directly:

kept = []
for value in [2, -1, 5]:
    if value < 0:
        continue
    kept.append(value)   # add one value to the end
# kept is [2, 5]

See it run

words = ["hi", "", "yo", "STOP", "ok"]
for w in words:
    if w == "":
        continue
    if w == "STOP":
        break
    print(w)
print("end")

continue skips the rest of this pass. break abandons the whole loop. Watch where each one lands.

Practice break & continue

Exercise 1

Loop n over range(1, 50). Skip multiples of 3 with continue, break once n is greater than 10, and print the rest, one number per line. Expected: 1 2 4 5 7 8 10.

Exercise 2

Process the readings list in the editor below in order. A negative reading is noise: skip it with continue. A reading of 99 is the shutdown marker: stop with break. Collect earlier valid readings in accepted; keep zero.

Exercise 3

Load the parcels list in the editor below in order with limit = 10. Skip zero or negative weights using continue. Stop at the first positive parcel that would exceed the limit using break; do not try later parcels. Store accepted weights in loaded and their sum in weight. A parcel that exactly fills the limit is allowed.

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Practice

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Visualizer Watch your code run line by line

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Memory · names → values

Variables appear here as Python creates them.

Output & plots