Continue Statement

Now let's look at the continue statement, which allows us to skip the rest of the current loop iteration and continue with the next iteration. Imagine you go running every day, but some days the weather is bad and you don't want to run. The continue statement allows you to skip such days and continue running on the other days.

An iteration refers to one pass through the loop.

For example, we want to print all numbers between 1 and 10 except those that are multiples of 3:

number = 1
while number <= 10:
    if number % 3 == 0: # If the number is a multiple of 3
        number = number + 1
        continue # Skip this iteration
    print(number)
    number = number + 1
# This will print: 1 2 4 5 7 8 10

In this example, we go through numbers from 1 to 10. If number is a multiple of 3, we increase it by 1 and skip its printing using the continue statement and move to the next iteration of the loop. If number is not a multiple of 3, we print it and increase it by 1. It is important to realize that once the program encounters the continue statement, it skips the rest of the statements in the loop's code block and continues with the next iteration. Let's go through a few iterations to make everything clear:

1. The loop starts, and the value of number is 1.
2. The condition is skipped as number is not a multiple of 3.
3. number (value 1) is printed.
4. number is increased by 1.
5. We go back to the beginning of the loop. Now the number is 2.
6. The condition is skipped as number is not a multiple of 3.
7. number (value 2) is printed.
8. number is increased by 1.
9. We go back to the beginning of the loop. Now the number is 3.
10. The condition is met, so number is increased by 1.
11. The rest of the iteration is skipped.
12. We go back to the beginning of the loop. Now the number is 4.
13. …