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Python

Posted by Keith Short
Keith Short
5,971 Points

Why do we need the 'continue' line in the input IF statement?

in the part of the program where we have:

while True:
    # ask for new items
    new_item = input("> ")

    # be able to quit the app
    if new_item == 'DONE':
        break
    elif new_item == 'HELP':
        show_help()
        continue

why do we need to add the line 'continue', surely at the end of the if statement the while loop would continue anyway?

1 Answer

Richard Navarro
Richard Navarro
2,858 Points

In that particular example, continue isn't required. The code should work just fine. However, in other situations you just might need a continue in your code to get the desired output.

Keith Short
Keith Short
5,971 Points

Ah okay thanks!

Do you have an example?

Keith Short
Keith Short
5,971 Points

Actually, there was a good example on the next code challenge:

def loopy(items):
    for item in items:
        if item[0] == "a":
            continue
        print(item)

using continue means we skip over the rest of the current loop ( ignoring print(item) ).