Q.Differentiate between break and continue statements using examples.

Loop Control Statements: Taking Charge of Your Loops

Imagine you're reading a book. A loop is like reading page after page automatically. But sometimes you need to stop early because you found the answer, or skip a boring chapter and keep going. Loop control statements are exactly that — they let you interrupt or modify the normal flow of a loop.

The Intuition First

A loop runs a block of code repeatedly until a condition becomes false. That's the default behaviour. But real problems aren't that simple. You might need to:

• Stop the loop entirely when you've found what you're looking for (no point reading the rest of the book)
• Skip the current iteration and move to the next one (skip that boring chapter, but keep reading)
• Do nothing for this round and just move on

These three needs map directly to three control statements: break, continue, and pass.

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The Three Statements

1. break — Exit the loop immediately

When break is encountered, the loop terminates right there. Control jumps to the first line after the loop.

for number in range(1, 11):
    if number == 5:
        break
    print(number)
# Output: 1 2 3 4

The loop was supposed to print 1 through 10. But at 5, break fired, and the loop ended. The remaining numbers (6–10) never got printed.

2. continue — Skip the rest of this iteration

When continue is hit, the current iteration stops early. The loop does not end — it just jumps to the next cycle.

for number in range(1, 6):
    if number == 3:
        continue
    print(number)
# Output: 1 2 4 5

Number 3 was skipped entirely. The loop continued with 4 and 5 normally.

3. pass — Do nothing (a placeholder)

pass is a null operation. It does exactly nothing. It's used where syntax requires a statement but you don't want any action.

for number in range(1, 6):
    if number == 3:
        pass   # Do nothing for 3
    print(number)
# Output: 1 2 3 4 5

Notice: 3 still gets printed. pass didn't skip anything — it just sat there, doing nothing.

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The Precise Statement

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A Real Example: Searching a List

Suppose you have a list of student roll numbers and you want to find roll number 42.

roll_numbers = [10, 25, 42, 67, 89]

for roll in roll_numbers: …