How To Use Break, Continue, and Pass Statements when Working with Loops in Python

Introduction

Using for loops and while loops in Python allows you to automate and efficiently repeat tasks.

But sometimes, an external factor may influence the way your program runs. When this occurs, you may want your program to exit a loop completely, skip part of a loop before continuing, or ignore that external factor. You can do these actions with break, continue, and pass statements.

Prerequisites

You should have Python 3 installed and a programming environment on your computer or server. Suppose you don’t have a programming environment set up. In that case, you can refer to the installation and setup guides for setting up a local Python programming environment on your server appropriate for your operating system (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, etc.)

Break Statement

In Python, the break statement allows you to exit out of a loop when an external condition is triggered. You’ll put the break statement within the code block under your loop statement, usually after a conditional if statement.

Let’s look at an example that uses the break statement in a for loop:

number = 0

for number in range(10):
    if number == 5:
        break    # break here

    print('Number is ' + str(number))

print('Out of loop')

The variable number is initialized at 0 in this small program. Then a for statement constructs the loop if the variable number is less than 10.

Within the for loop, an if statement presents the condition that if the variable number is equivalent to the integer 5, then the loop will break.

Within the loop is also a print() statement that will execute with each iteration of the for loop until the loop breaks, since it is after the break statement.

Let’s place a final print() statement outside of the for loop to know when you are out of the loop.

When you run this code, you will get the following output:

Output
Number is 0
Number is 1
Number is 2
Number is 3
Number is 4
Out of loop

This shows that once the integer number is evaluated as equivalent to 5, the loop breaks, as the program is told to do so with the break statement.

The break statement causes a program to break out of a loop.

Continue Statement

The continue statement allows you to skip over the part of a loop where an external condition is triggered, but to go on to complete the rest of the loop. The current iteration of the loop will be disrupted, but the program will return to the top of the loop.

The continue statement will be within the code block under the loop statement, usually after a conditional if statement.

Using the same for loop program as in the Break Statement section above, we’ll use a continue statement rather than a break statement:

number = 0

for number in range(10):
    if number == 5:
        continue    # continue here

    print('Number is ' + str(number))

print('Out of loop')

The difference in using the continue statement rather than a break statement is that our code will continue despite the disruption when the variable number is evaluated as equivalent to 5. Let’s review our output:

Output
Number is 0
Number is 1
Number is 2
Number is 3
Number is 4
Number is 6
Number is 7
Number is 8
Number is 9
Out of loop

Here, Number is 5 never occurs in the output, but the loop continues after that point to print lines for the numbers 6–10 before leaving the loop.

You can use the continue statement to avoid deeply nested conditional code or optimize a loop by eliminating frequently occurring cases you would like to reject.

The continue statement causes a program to skip certain factors that come up within a loop but then continue through the rest of the loop.

Pass Statement

When an external condition is triggered, the pass statement allows you to handle the condition without the loop being impacted in any way; all of the code will continue to be read unless a break or other statement occurs.

As with the other statements, the pass statement will be within the code block under the loop statement, typically after a conditional if statement.

Using the same code block as above, let’s replace the break or continue statement with a pass statement:

number = 0

for number in range(10):
    if number == 5:
        pass    # pass here

    print('Number is ' + str(number))

print('Out of loop')

After the if conditional statement, the pass statement tells the program to continue running the loop and ignore that the variable number evaluates as equivalent to 5 during one of its iterations.

You’ll run the program and get the following output:

Output
Number is 0
Number is 1
Number is 2
Number is 3
Number is 4
Number is 5
Number is 6
Number is 7
Number is 8
Number is 9
Out of loop

By using the pass statement in this program, you notice that the program runs exactly as it would if there were no conditional statements in the program. The pass statement tells the program to disregard that condition and continue to run the program as usual.

The pass statement can create minimal classes, or act as a placeholder when working on new code and thinking on an algorithmic level before hammering out details.

Conclusion

The break, continue, and pass statements in Python will allow you to use for loops and while loops more effectively in your code.

To work more with break and pass statements, you can follow the tutorial How To Create a Twitterbot with Python 3 and the Tweepy Library.