continue — the polite skip

The problem...

You're looping through a sequence. Most items — you process. Some items — you want to skip.

Right now you have no clean way to do that. The loop runs everything, every time.

The idea!

continue skips the rest of the current iteration and jumps straight to the next one. The loop doesn't stop — it just moves on.

The syntax

for item in sequence:
    if condition:
        continue    # skip — go to next iteration
    # this runs only if continue wasn't triggered

Your first continue

word = "Bull"

for letter in word:
    if letter == "u":
        continue
    print(letter)

# B
# l
# l

The loop hits "u" — continue fires — the print is skipped. The loop moves to the next letter and carries on.

What's really happening

Without continue:

# B → print
# u → print
# l → print
# l → print

With continue on "u":

# B → print
# u → continue → skip print → next iteration
# l → print
# l → print

The loop never stops. It just skips what you tell it to skip.

A real example

word = input("Enter a word: ")

for letter in word:
    if letter == " ":
        continue
    print(letter)

Every space is skipped. Everything else prints. One condition. Clean.

Heads up!

• continue skips the rest of the current iteration — not the whole loop
• The loop keeps running — only that one iteration is cut short
• continue always works with a condition — alone it would skip everything
• Everything after continue in the same iteration is ignored

The mindset shift

Stop thinking: "I need to handle every item the same way."

Start thinking: "Some items don't deserve the full treatment — skip them."

What you should understand now

• continue skips the rest of the current iteration
• The loop continues normally from the next item
• Use it with a condition — to skip specific items, not all of them
• Everything after continue in the same block is ignored for that iteration